Friday, May 9, 2003

iYear. It was about a year ago that, after a decade or so of Windows on my client and Unix/Linux on my servers, I bought a TiBook and got into OS X. I am only rarely tempted to go back. It's worth it, I think, to look back over the past year and see what the take-aways are.... [ongoing] Tim Bray talking about the ups and downs of his last year with his Apple TiBook. I'm using the iMac at home every chance I get. I LOVE this box. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I had to work on it every day. I'd like to believe I'd love it even more. Especially because it seems to manage resources extremely well, it's very quiet, and it has all this wonderful eye candy and screen realestate. Unlike Tim, I find iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD to be wonderful. But, I'm not a true aficionado of the digital arts. As for me, iTunes is da' bomb! 11:31:12 PM    comment []

Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing. In recent years my primary interest has become programmer productivity. Programmer cycles are expensive, CPU cycles are cheap, and I believe that we should no longer pay for the latter with the former. [Thinking About Computing] Excellent article by Bruce Eckel on Strong vs. Dynamic Typing. He gives his examples in Java vs. Python. Bruce contributes to the growing sentiment that compilation checking in statically typed languages is really just a small number of tests. To determine if code is really correct, then you have to use unit tests. If you are using unit tests for your dynamically typed code, there is no reason it won't be just as correct as your statically typed code. Plus, dynamic languages are usually much easier to work with! Great praise for Python in this article. 8:54:41 PM    comment []

Language Fermentation. If you're a programmer, I think you're lucky, because this is an exciting time we're living in: there's some powerful intellectual ferment in progress out there. This may be the golden age of programming, as Paul Graham argues, and maybe everything we thought we knew about strong typing is wrong. Herewith a bit of surveyware with a touch of debunking and a practical footnote on Java exception handling. (Warning: geeky.)... [ongoing] Great thoughts on Strong vs. Dynamic Typing. A really clever use of Java's RuntimeException - to eliminate throwing exceptions throughout your code. 8:29:09 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Tom Pierce.