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  • Charles Simonyi reveals production use of Intentional Software @ JAOO

    Charles Simonyi (recent space tourist, and ex-Microsoft lead architect of Word & Excel) presented Intentional Software at the JAOO conference today. Intentional is building a domain language workbench, which allows business experts write domain code in their own familiar notations, that code then being used to generate the rest of an application.

  • Is it too late for Parrot VM?

    The Parrot Virtual Machine recently had it’s sixth birthday. Parrot is a VM that sprung out of the Perl6 development, which primarily targets dynamic languages, but also for instance .NET and C99. But six years is a long time, and both Microsoft and Sun is targeting this segment. Is it too late for Parrot?

  • Interview: Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design

    Ever since Eric Evans wrote the book Domain-Driven Design in 2004 he has been a significant voice advancing domain modeling and design concepts. In this interview with Floyd Marinescu he talks about some of the recent refinements in Domain-Driven Design and how people are advancing the field today.

  • Visual Basic and C#: Differences in Nullable Types

    When .NET 1.0 was released, VB and C# were very similar. But with the fourth version nearing release, the differences are really mounting. Today we look at the subtle differences in nullable types that can trip up developers.

  • Stephan T. Lavavej on the future of C++

    On the Microsoft Visual C++ blog Stephan T. Lavavej, a library developer, speculates about the future of the C++ language.

  • RubyLearning.com to Relaunch Free Online Lessons

    After achieving popularity last summer, Satish Talim at <a href="http://www.rubylearning.com/" target="_new">RubyLearning</a> is doing it again with his free online course. It started as a way for him to pick up the language, and after the community picked up on it, over 100 people joined him. He hopes to do better this time.

  • Ruby 1.9 adds Fibers for lightweight concurrency

    Fibers were recently in the Ruby 1.9 branch. The Coroutine-like concept has many uses, such as implementing lightweight concurrency and others. We look at the concept and influences of Fibers in Ruby 1.9, as well as code samples.

  • Presentation: Erik Meijers on Democratizing the Cloud

    As the Dutch artist MC Escher once said "Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible". At Microsoft, Erik Meijers is trying to stretch .NET to cover the Cloud such that developers can incrementally and seamlessly design, develop, and debug complex distributed applications using your favorite existing and unmodified .NET compiler and deploy these applications anywhere.

  • JRuby targets Java 5

    After long discussions, the JRuby team has decided to target Java 5 with post-1.0 JRuby. Users stuck on 1.4 need not despair, though. A solution using Retroweaver has been set up.

  • Java Language Runtime (JLR) project created

    A new project aims to increase collaboration among JVM based languages. The Java Language Runtime aims to collect code that is common among languages targeting the JVM and prevent duplication among the providers of JRuby, Jython, Groovy, and many others.

  • Explicit vs. concise code in Ruby

    Ruby offers many ways of reducing code size. However, this can backfire in some situations. We look at one problem with Ruby's method for identifying nil and false values.

  • JRuby: Java5 or not?

    A discussion in the JRuby space is resurfacing: Should the project move to Java 5. Is it worth breaking compatibility with Java 1.4? Using languages features like Annotations and Enums would be useful, as well as and not having to use a backport of the Concurrency libs. We look at the pros and cons.

  • Rubinius Internals: Threading, ObjectSpace, Debugging

    We continue the interview with Rubinius creator Evan Phoenix and talk about internals of how the VM uses bytecode manipulation for fast debugging, problems of implementing ObjectSpace and Threading.

  • Presentation: The Beauty of Ruby

    As Edd Dumbill wrote, "the subtle elegance of the Ruby idiom is a slowly appreciated and highly satisfying flavour." It's true that some of the best things about Ruby aren't obvious to newcomers. In this talk Glenn Vanderburg demonstrates some of the subtle beauty that experienced Rubyists know and love.

  • What's a Ruby DSL and what isn't?

    "Domain Specific Language" (DSL) is a popular buzzword in the Ruby community. Recently, however, doubts about the use of the term arose, particularly because it tends to be used even for ordinary APIs, simply because Ruby allows to omit parentheses. We look at some of the style debates.

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