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  Why I love Common Lisp and hate Java

“Common what?” is a common reply I get when I mention Common Lisp. Perhaps rightly so, since Common Lisp is not all that common these days.Developed in the sixties, it is one of the oldest programming languages out there. In its heydays it was used mostly for Artificial Intelligence research at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the like, and therefore has a lingering association with AI. People not in AI shy away from Lisp. Common Lisp is a powerful and versatile programming language that can and should be used more often in other paradigms. It saddens me to see that Common L...

6,726 1       JAVA COMPARISON COMMON LISP LISP


  Regex vs IndexOf in Java.

OverviewThe author of these articles Are C# .Net Regular Expressions Fast Enough for You? and .Net Regex: Can Regular Expression Parsing be Faster than XmlDocument or Linq to Xml? recently pointed out to me that he had found that Regular expressions were at least as fast or faster than the alternatives in C#. However it has been my experience that regular expressions in Java were slower. It is hard for me to say why this might be different in Java and C# or even if these are fair comparisons but here is what I found in Java.Searching XML for the start of a fieldThis test searches for the exp...

6,088 0       JAVA REGULAR EXPRESSION EFFICIENCY INDEXOF


  Standardizing Python WSGI deployment

Over the past year I have been testing all of the new python platform as a service companies that have popped up, and I have posted my notes on my blog so that everyone can learn from my experiences. ep.io, apphosted.com, gondor.io, dotcloud.com, DjangoZoom.com, Heroku, Django hosting roundup,All and all, the platforms were very similar, they allowed you to easily host your python/django project without having to worry about managing a server or other typical system administration duties. Some of the services were more advanced and had more features then others, but since it was s...

2,786 0       JAVA PYTHON STANDARD WAR


  Clojure & Java Interop

About a year ago I got a phone call asking if I wanted to join another team at DRW. The team supports a (primarily) Java application, but the performance requirements would also allow it to be written in a higher level language. I'd been writing Clojure (basically) full-time at that point - so my response was simple: I'd love to join, but I'm going to want to do future development using Clojure.A year later we still have plenty of Java, but the vast majority of the new code I add is Clojure. One of the big reasons I'm able to use Clojure so freely is the seamless interop with Java.Execute Cloj...

3,652 0       JAVA FUNCTION CALL CLOJURE INTEROPRABILITY COMMIT


  Java API vs Framework

What is the difference between a Java Library and a framework? The two concepts are essentially important for a Java developer. The most important difference between a library and a framework is Inversion of Control. It means that when you call a library you are in control. But with a framework, the control is inverted: the framework calls you. (This is called the Hollywood Principle: Don’t call Us, We’ll call You.) This is pretty much the definition of a framework. Basically, all the control flow is already in the framework, and there’s just a bunch of predefined white sp...

8,176 0       JAVA FRAMEWORK DIFFERENCE API LIBRARY


  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my last year entrenched in JavaScript and appreciating its functional nature, brevity and flexibility, writing Ja...

2,469 0       JAVA OOP SCALA FUNCTIONAL ITERATION


  Java Doesn't Need to Be So Bad

I do a lot of Java coding and I enjoy it. I admit that there is a lotof typing, often a lot of boilerplate and getting even simple tasksdone can involve too much work. Most of the tools that try to fixthese problems trade one moment saved for another lost. Maven's XMLbased configuration file is a good example: Thank you for making myproject easier to manage and I won't forget that you made me edit XMLto do so.These are the things that you live with, these are the things youtrade for using a language that thinks it's finishing what C++started; a language that is loved equally by mammoth corpora...

2,463 0       JAVA CODING ENTERPRISE APPLICATION TEDIOUS


  Bad code plagues business applications, especially Java ones

A new study examining 365 million lines of code in 745 applications identifies bad coding practices that affect security, performance and uptime, with Java Enterprise Edition applications having the greatest number of problems. Cast Software, which makes tools that automate the analysis of business applications, examined programs written in Java-EE, .NET, ABAP, C, C++, Cobol, Oracle Forms, and Visual Basic, used across a wide range of industries from energy and financial services to IT consulting, insurance, government, retail, telecom, and more. Java-EE applications were the most prevalent in...

3,288 0       JAVA PROGRAM SECURITY DEFECTS