maetl

Java

Ascii Art Diagrams

ditaa is a small command-line utility written in Java, that can convert diagrams drawn using ascii art into proper bitmap graphics.

Escaping the equality conundrum

Equality is a mathematical concept, not an object concept. It's contextual. So, what is the correct implementation of equals? Sometimes it's no implementation at all. On the Beautiful Code…

Is PHP Doomed?

There's a tide of opinion suggesting that PHP is threatened with extinction as standard hardware begins to favour widening multicore processors. This would be a fair argument if PHP was a general…

Howling arrays of wolves

Physical/Mental side-effects include howling arrays of wolves that cannot be popped out;

What is least surprising?

I always enjoy reading interviews and discussions with Larry Wall - a brilliant language designer whose unconventional wisdom and humor makes his explanations of complex and chaotic issues seem…

When a language is only as good as its tools

Ruby programs can be written in unicode, meaning that you can label a real lambda. Once, when working on a school assignment to build a simple regular expression interpreter, I had a similar flash…

Java Chases Its Tail Calls

John Rose talks about implementing support for tail call optimization in the JVM. I've been waiting for this one, as in my mind, it has long been one of the biggest holes in the leaky dike of…

Four reasons...

Why you would choose PHP over Java on your next major CMS development project: You want to write anywhere, run once. You want to work directly with classes,…

The Missing Literary Traditions of Programming

Learning how to forget the properties of programming languages themselves, and think about the context of what is actually written in these languages.

Software is not made of Bricks

Raganwald dissects the misguided metaphor from a software process perspective. I have come to believe that these kinds of problems are even more prevalent in the web development world than in…

Thinking Beyond Java

Last year, I picked up this curious book which seemed to sum up the zeitgeist of web programming in 2005 - an interesting and polemical twist from O'Reilly