Category Archives: Programming Language Punditry

New PeriodicalUpdater Feature, and, Mutable Data Sucks: A Case in Point

By Robert Fischer | Published: November 6, 2009

The jQuery PeriodicalUpdater, which has been getting lots of love because of feedback and support over here, has a new feature. The “data” configuration argument now will work properly with numbers and anonymous functions. This means that you can have your periodical updater send different information across in different runs. I’ve said before that null [...]

Also posted in Open Source | 3 Comments

null Sucks: A Case in Point

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 17, 2009

Take a look at this API: ClassNode#addProperty. Turns out that if you pass null into getterBlock and setterBlock, you get the default implementations. Maybe1. Normally passing null around blows up in unhelpful ways, but here null is a useful value. How is a programmer to know? I’m increasingly convinced that immutability2 and strong type systems [...]

Also posted in Groovy | 1 Comment

1024 by 2012!

By Brian Hurt | Published: September 14, 2009

This will be a short blog post, but I just wanted to point out this article from El Reg on the future roadmap of the Sparc CPU. Especially check out the graphic associated with that article. Here we have Sun/Oracle’s roadmap for the Sparc processor- and we see that by 2012, Cascade Falls will have [...]

Posted in Programming Language Punditry | 7 Comments

We Aren’t Too Stupid for Polyglot Programming

By Robert Fischer | Published: August 7, 2009

As those who listened to my WebDev Radio interview know, I am working on a book on polyglot programming. This has me asking smart people what they think about polyglot programming, and one of the most surprising pieces of feedback I’ve gotten (from Grails podcast, among others) is that polyglot programming is somehow “too hard”: [...]

Also posted in Classic | 22 Comments

What is a functional programming language?

By Brian Hurt | Published: July 23, 2009

Many people debating whether a given language X is or is not a functional programming language don’t have a good idea of what a functional programming language is. There is a very rigorous definition of what is meant by “functional”, and I’d like to introduce people to it.

Also posted in Classic | 22 Comments

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