programming

Parallelism vs concurrency in programming

From this terrific article on parallelism vs concurrency.

From the original article by Joe Armstrong:

Concurrent = two queues and one coffee machine.
Parallel = Two queues and two coffee machines.

Law of Demeter - Java examples

Summary: The Law of Demeter is discussed using Java source code examples.

Whenever you talk to a good, experienced programmer, they will tell you that "loosely coupled" classes are very important to good software design.

The Law of Demeter for functions (or methods, in Java) attempts to minimize coupling between classes in any program. In short, the intent of this "law" is to prevent you from reaching into an object to gain access to a third object's methods. The Law of Demeter is often described this way:

2013, the year that quality forgot

I truly believe (or at least hope) that 2013 will be seen as the year that software companies forgot about quality. Here are just a few examples I noticed last night and this morning:

Twitter: Today I was notified that people “favorited” some of my posts. Cool. Oh, wait, they were favorited eight days ago, but just showed up today.

The Ballmer Peak

From Urban Dictionary: The theory that computer programmers obtain quasi-magical, superhuman coding ability when they have a blood alcohol concentration percentage between 0.129% and 0.138%.

A description of 'beautiful code' by Ward Cunningham

A description of 'beautiful code' by Ward Cunningham. From the book, Clean Code.

Computer programming languages ranked by "expressiveness"

Computer programming languages ranked by "expressiveness", from http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-by-...

Using Scala as a 'better Java'

A lot of people want to sell Scala as a functional programming (FP) language. That's fine, it certainly is, and FP has many benefits. But when I first started working with Scala I was just looking for a "better Java".

Personally, I grew tired of Java's verbosity. Ruby showed us a different way, and I loved it, but ... after a while I felt like many of my unit tests in Ruby wouldn't be necessary if the language had static types. I wished for a concise Ruby-like language with static types.

Favorite quotes from the book 'Clean Code'

I just went through my notes on the book, Clean Code, and thought I'd share what I thought were some of the best quotes and "lessons learned" from reading that book.

How much are you worth to your employer?

This is a short story from my book, A Survival Guide for New Consultants:

A long time ago -- 1991 to be exact -- a friend of mine named Joe was a contractor for the aerospace company I worked at. Just like a consultant, Joe was paid by the hour.

Scala Cookbook - Coming soon

Just a quick note tonight that my new book, Scala Cookbook, will be coming soon. The book is being published by O'Reilly, and you can see preliminary information about it on their Scala Cookbook page.

Here's what the cover looks like:

Scala Cookbook

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