InfoQ Homepage Programming Content on InfoQ
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Debate about Testing and Recoverability: Object Oriented vs. Functional Programming Languages
In his latest blog post, Michael Feathers argued that object oriented programming languages offer some built-in features that facilitate testing and are therefore more recovery friendly than functional languages. Proponents of functional languages expressed strong disagreement with this statement, which provoked a very passionate debate in the blog community.
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Interview: Joe Walker about DWR 3.0
InfoQ had the opportunity to talk with the <a href="http://getahead.org/dwr">DWR</a> (Direct Web Remoting) project lead <a href="http://getahead.org/blog/joe/" title="Joe Walker's Blog">Joe Walker</a>. He discussed the upcoming release of DWR 3.0 including major features, helpful features and fixes for developers, a time line and a look at the future of DWR.
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Implicit line continuations in Visual Basic
Line continuation characters have always been a wart on the VB syntax. Unlike languages in the Pascal and C families, Visual Basic does not require a trailing semi-colon to denote the end of a statement. The trade-off for this is that it does need a character to indicate when the statement does not end. Paul Vic is proposing to eliminate continuation characters in most common cases.
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Using the Task Scheduler in Vista and Windows Server 2008
Task Scheduler is an useful addition to Windows Vista and the upcoming Windows Server 2008. This is a quick lesson on how to use the Task Scheduler from managed code.
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Interview: CORBA Guru Steve Vinoski on REST, Web Services, and Erlang
In a new interview, recorded at QCon San Francisco 2007, CORBA Guru Steve Vinoski talks to Stefan Tilkov about his appreciation for REST, occasions when he would still use CORBA and the role of description languages for distributed systems. Other topics covered include the benefits of knowing many programming languages, and the usefulness of of Erlang to build distributed systems.
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Ruby 1.9 with Symbol#to_proc and (soon) curried Procs
Ruby 1.9 added the to_proc feature to Symbol, which allows for a very succinct way to create Procs that just call one method. Also: a recent development version of 1.9 added currying to Ruby. We look at how these features work and what they can be used for.
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Presentation: Ruby and the Art of Domain Specific Languages
Rich Kilmer gives an introduction to the art of creating Domain Specific Languages in Ruby. The presentation gives a basic introduction, but moves on to useful distinctions in DSL styles, such as implicit vs. explicit internal DSLs or declarative vs. imperative DSLs. A look at a long list of real world DSLs Rich has created rounds of the presentation.
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Bringing Scripting back to VB
Historically Visual Basic has its roots in scripting and dynamic programming, but never fully embraced it. This is seen in mismatched language features such as the ability to consume objects via late binding, a.k.a. duck typing, but no ability to define them. In a presentation at Lang.NET, Paul Vick talks about bringing scripting back to VB.
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QCon Panel: What will the Future of Java Development Be?
In this panel from QCon San Francisco, Joshua Bloch, Chet Haase, Rod Johnson, Erik Meijer and Charles Nutter discussed and debated the future of the Java language and APIs based upon the lessons we have learned from the past. Topics included static versus dynamic languages, removing code from Java, forking the JVM, and the next big programming language.
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How to Develop New Activities for the One Laptop Per Child Project?
The One Laptop Per Child project has starting shipping its first generation of XO laptops. OLPC "is not a laptop project, it is an education project", explains Nicholas Negroponte, director of the project. A full Sugar based development environment is available for developers to contribute new activities to the project. Sugar supports collaborative activities when XOs are meshed together.
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Presentation: Erik Meijer on C# 3.0 and LINQ
In this QCon presentation Erik Meijer talks about C# 3.0 and LINQ. He builds upon his theme of democratizing the web while discussing the new language features of C#.
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Communicating Intent through Idiom and Paradigm Selection
What about using idioms and programming conventions as signals to achieve more readability and expressiveness? This is what Reg Braithwaite advocates for, suggesting that syntax or even paradigm choices can be a means to communicate the intent.
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Bill Burke on Dynamic Languages: Rationalizations and Myths
"Am I just a Java fanboy?" - this is a good question. And it is one that Bill Burke does answer in his blog post Dynamic Languages: Rationalizations and Myths. But along with the post comes an overwhelming response, and insight into where we are heading as a community.
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Scalability: Dynamic and Static Programming Languages
In the wake of the demise of Chandler personal information management project, a discussion has occurred on TSS about the scalability potential of dynamic languages. Ted Neward attempted to go beyond language quarrel in order to provide some structured insights on this issue.
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Anvil - Ruby MVC GUI library
Anvil is a new Ruby GUI MVC framework aimed to make GUI development with Ruby simpler. Taking ideas from Rails and Merb, it provides code generators and other tools to automate much of the tedious work. InfoQ caught up with the developer Lance Carlson to see what's behind Anvil and what's planned for future releases.