Community Server

The guys at Codehaus are moving the continuous integration servers. I must say that I had a WTF-moment when this build failure notification dropped in my inbox: I find it amusing that the build failed because “all the tests passed”. The real reason was that it was unable to find Maven on the build server…

My last post on Java generics and the Repository pattern got a bit of interest. Judging from the feedback I got, I feel the need to elaborate on the Inversion of Control part of this. As some readers pointed out, Google’s Guice container employes super type tokens to support generics to some extent. The IoC example I gave in my previous post ...

Whenever I stray off the beaten path of Java generics, I instantly miss C#’s generics implementation. Earlier today, Java’s type erasure erased a few good hours of productivity whilst I was doing a spike on bringing the IRepository<T> experience to Java. In C# you can get the class of any generic type argument in a straight forward ...

One of the challenges I have experienced when giving talks or blogging about domain specific languages is that developers are a little reluctant to writing code in languages they are unfamiliar with. This holds true even if the DSL in question is an external DSL based on commonly available languages such as Boo, Ruby, Groovy or ...

I’m not sure if its because Java developers have a flurry of good IDEs to choose from, but IDE pimping is a rare hobby among Java developers. However, since I’m a polyglot developing stuff in a range of languages I enjoy having a familiar, nice look and feel across all the tools I use. When I swapped my Windows for a Mac, I instantly ...

A variation of the Vibrant Ink theme as an IntelliJ IDEA color scheme.

There are always some Java developers who attend whenever I give my .NET DSL talk. This is super cool, and at it makes for some new challenges. The most common one is “How can we do these things with Java”. Since the JavaZone guys have introduced an emerging languages track and extended their call for papers deadline to next month, I ...

Fredrik Kalseth posted a notice about his talk for the Norwegian .NET User Group’s (NNUG) Vestfold’s chapter, so I thought I’d follow in his footsteps to inform the world about my speaking engagements next week. On Tuesday February 26th I’m giving a talk on language oriented programming with .NET for the Oslo chapter of ...

Whatever language you write in, your task as a programmer is to do the best you can with the tools at hand. A good programmer can overcome a poor language or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will not rescue a bad programmer. Kernighan and Pike When I attended Richard Öberg’s talk on Qi4J at the Oslo ...

There is an article in this week’s Economist referring to a paper by Dr. Mark Pagel et al published in the latest edition of Science on (spoken) languages evolving in punctuational bursts. The key point in Dr. Pagel’s research is that evolutionary change happens in sudden jumps separated by long periods of creeping evolution. The ...