Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

 PROGRAMMING


  First steps with Scala, say goodbye to bash scripts…

Those who know me are aware that I’ve been following play framework, and actively taking part of it’s community, for a couple of years.Playframework 2.0 is right around the corner, and it’s core is programmed in Scala, so it’s a wonderful opportunity to give this object-oriented / functional hybrid beast a try…Like many others, I will pick a very simple script to give my first steps…Finding an excuse to give Scala a tryWith a couple of friends we are on the way to translate play framework documentation to spanish (go have a look at it at http://play...

2,483 0       SCALA FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING BASH SCRIPT REPLACEMENT


  Web programs written in C++ are no big deal

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...

1,872 0       WEB DESIGN C++ LIBRARY WEB APP


  The 5 types of programmers

In my code journeys and programming adventures I’ve encountered many strange foes, and even stranger allies. I’ve identified at least five different kinds of code warriors, some make for wonderful comrades in arms, while others seem to foil my every plan.However they all have their place in the pantheon of software development. Without a healthy mix of these different programming styles you’ll probably find your projects either take too long to complete, are not stable enough or are too perfect for humans to look upon. The duct tape programmerThe code may not be pretty...

9,940 3       PROGRAMMER TYPE ANTI-PROGRAMMER OCD


  True Scala complexity

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...

3,616 0       COMPLEXITY SCALA


  C++ 11 Memory Management

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...

4,699 0       MEMORY MANAGEMENT MEMORY LEAK C++ 11 GC


  Why I switched from Ruby back to C++

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...

2,481 0       C++ RUBY ADVANTAGE FEATURE


  The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

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...

2,902 0       C EVOLVEMENT GCC FALLACY


  Why Data Structures Matter

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:...

2,275 0       DATA STRUCTURE JPR IMPORTANCE