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Category Archives: Software development

Programming languages are about people

Programming languages are more about people and less about machines. Programming languages are about staying inside the limitations of people’s minds and their ability to keep track of and work with abstractions. If people had no such limitations, they could code in assembly language all the time. Programming languages and supporting tools and environments are […]

Posted 28 September 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Scala and actors

Programming with actors was a new concept to me until I tried it out in Scala. It’s appears to be one of Scala’s most celebrated features, judging by the official blurb. Actors was a daunting word at first but it really ends up being a very simple concept. Actors are a programming model for concurrent […]

Posted 30 August 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , ,

First steps with Scala: XML pull parsing

I’m now going to share some of the results of my recent experiments with the Scala programming language. In May I wrote that I had started looking at it. I’ve been using it to make some support tools that I needed for research work since. First a disclaimer: It’s been 4+ years since I did serious […]

Posted 14 August 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

An unusual Java construct

I now break the longstanding tradition of not posting code on this blog. I just wanted to share what I believe to be a somewhat unusual pattern in Java: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 public IMethod findMethod(String name, String[] types) […]

Posted 29 July 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , ,

The ego fallacy

A senior manager at a company I used to work at once said that (making) software is a very social activity. I didn’t have much experience, and was very surprised at the time, since I had never thought about the human aspect of software development. But of course this aspect is extremely important. For example, […]

Posted 01 July 2009 † johan § ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,