Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thought it would be constructive to provide a clearer illustration of why it’s real and how it manif...

Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that? Want to see it again?”Since then I haven’t seen a lock screen interface that has made me feel that same “how obvious, how elegant!” feeling – until today at the NVIDIA press conference, and later at the Microsoft keynote here at CES. It sounds a little silly, sure, making such a big deal of such a small feature, but it’s just nice to see a genuinely na...

Enterprise development and networking specialist Stephen B. Morris illustrates how to handle a classic C/C++ problem by using the new features in C++ 11 in conjunction with more established techniques.Memory management has always been one of the most error-prone areas of C++. The same is true of C. One of the strengths of managed languages, such as Java and C#, is their support for automatic garbage collection. Garbage collection still isn't a feature of C++ 11, so we must still be careful in our memory management. However, there is some good news: C++ 11 has added features that strengthen the...

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net.Why I did itSlow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just get slow frames coming up. My game is timed to run at 60 frames per second, which means that each frame should...

I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on oneof my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org,and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++.It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the sense of needing to be able to fairly directly munge the stack, address specific hardware registers, etc. But...

The rave reviews for the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows Phone aren’t the only reason Microsoft will do better in the smart phone industry than it did in the MP3 player market.Whereas the Zune never really offered anything substantially different from the iPod and never pushed any real boundaries, Microsoft’s latest push into the mobile operating system business is much more bold. Microsoft isn’t rushing it this time – and it shows.So far, tech pundits of all stripes are pretty impressed with the Windows Phone OS and its evolution. We can’t be ...

Our experience on Day 0 of JPR11 yielded a nice example of the need to choose an appropriate implementation of an abstract concept. As I mentioned in the previous post, we experimented with Michael Barker’s Scala implementation of Guy Steele’s parallelizable word-splitting algorithm (slides 51-67). Here’s the core of the issue.Given a type-compatible associative operator and sequence of values, we can fold the operator over the sequence to obtain a single accumulated value. For example, because addition of integers is associative, addition can be folded over the sequence:...

One of the joys of programming is that no matter how simple a problem may seem there are always tons of ways to solve it. It can be good practice to go back and revisit fundamentals by solving simple problems with as many implementations as you can think of. In this post we'll explore approaches to basic iteration in JavaScript.This style of exercise is a good interviewing technique, too, because it's open ended and leads to good discussions. The focus isn't a tricky, wacky problem you're seeing for the first time ever, but bread and butter programming awareness, command, and comfort. It's a g...