July 16th, 2008 chris
Many software developers agree that the best way to be a good programmer is to program. That sounds obvious to most of us (even those that don’t program), but it’s simply not enough to program whatever it is you do for a living. Improving your coding techniques on your work code helps, but I think it’s best to try out your new techniques on code that’s totally different from what you normally do. I picked up on it a while ago from CodeKata, and it’s why I like messing around with language interoperability and other random stuff that I haven’t had to use thus far in my programming life. It just boils down to the adage given by Abraham Maslow:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.
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June 30th, 2008 chris
Another side project I’m exploring this summer is the Scala programming language. It’s got a ton of wild and wacky features and is interesting enough to merit further exploration. That being said, I’ve used Scala on and off for a few weeks and have come up with the following thoughts on Scala:
For those not familiar with Scala, it’s object-oriented (objects are “first-class”) and functional (functions are “first-class”). These have been here for a while independently, with Smalltalk from 1980 (in terms of OO languages) and Lisp from 1958 (in terms of functional languages). They’ve also been here for a while together: a notable one I’ve used in the past is O’Caml, and a library for Java exists that provides the language with closures (Functional Java). So what makes Scala special?
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