I just thought of this, as I sat contemplating an issue I’m having at work. The issue, without getting too much into detail, is about the best practices for designing a certain pluggable component of a larger framework. As with much of the OO C-descendant world, the component is defined by an interface that someone implements, and the question has arisen, “How do we tell somebody to write one of these?”
Archive for the ‘programming’ Category
it should be obvious how to use it
Friday, August 24th, 2007why languages matter (or: why that guy doesn’t understand the meaning of “syntactic sugar”)
Friday, August 17th, 2007I’ve been thinking more about one of my coworker’s many (strong) opinions, that programming languages are nothing more than syntax. I worry that we get too far taken by this argument, that we start to think of languages as the brand of hammer we use to pound the nail instead of the tools we use to solve the problem. Then again, languages are even more than the tools we use to solve the problem, they are the problem.
LINQ’s query syntax was created to make me angry
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007Before you big C# fellaters out there get all pissed off, let me start by saying how cool some of the new C# features are. For those of you who aren’t tuned in to the Microsoft Kool-Aid bandwagon, C# is becoming, well, more Lispy (by which I mean is getting language features that will let it sit at the Adult Table next Thanksgiving). Features that C#, along with some other languages (Java, I’m looking at you, you red-headed stepchild of programming languages), have been needing.
stop crapping on C++
Thursday, June 28th, 2007I happened upon this article, about the double-casting anti-pattern in C#, and I couldn’t help but notice the little pot-shots taken at C++ (and Delphi), to the point that people who exhibit use of this anti-pattern probably came from those weakly-typed languages.
tired
Friday, June 15th, 2007Sorry I haven’t written in a few score. The general news is that I’ve moved out to Sammamish, Washington, got a new car (Mazda6 i Sports Value Edition), got a new apartment at a community called Boulder creek, and start my job this coming Monday. Any interested peoples can check out any pictures I’ve taken thus far at http://noahsmark.com/pictures, which gets updated rather frequently. I have the internets now (all of them), so you can find me on AIM (well, pidgin) with the screenname silentdakeyras.
Speaking of “pidgin”, go look it up. After I downloaded v2.0 of pidgin (formerly gaim), I thought it was just a cute misspelling. A few hours later, I read it in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace, and figured that, barring any kind of Truman Show style conspiracy, it was a real word. Seriously, go look it up. Good stuff.
Swing has it backwards
Monday, April 2nd, 2007One of the questions that I have been asked (and have asked myself) is why I’m even doing this project when Swing seems to give you a viable alternative. For example, for a JList, you can grab the ListModel and use it to register for event changes on the JList. At first, this all seems well and good, except for a really important issue: this is backwards.
be careful of the hashCode()
Sunday, April 1st, 2007Update:
As it turns out, I was (mostly) being a horse’s ass. It was a bit difficult to find, but Java does provide a mechanism for getting the equivalent of Object.hashCode() on any given object (not in a general way, i.e. get the un-overridden behavior, but for this case specifically). That method is System.identityHashCode().
One of the side-effects of the way Java is designed is that it is hard to identify an object. By this, I don’t mean identifying it by its apparent value, as in a List is the same as another list with the same stuff in the same order. What I mean is identifying an object as this object, not by its value, but by its physical existence in the whole program world thingamabobber. This usually isn’t too big of a problem, until you really start working with the collection framework’s HashMap.
multiple inheritance or something like it
Sunday, March 25th, 2007I’ve always felt slightly offended by the people who write off multiple inheritance in one fell swoop as being something akin to the fight against guns – it’s always misused, and there is no real useful purpose, so we might as well get rid of it in its entirety. There is a slight truth to the statement, as it applies to both guns and MI (the misuse, for example), but the conclusion is oh. so. wrong.
noah = angry
Friday, March 23rd, 2007Today’s little blog post comes in response to a guest article posted on The Daily WTF (which used to be What The Fuck, until the author became even more retarded than he usually is, and now it is The Daily Worse-Than-Failure). Feel free to read the original article before you continue on here, although there really isn’t anything specific you are going to learn from it: Guest Article: Our Dirty Little Secret – Worse Than Failure.
Independent Study – It Begins!
Monday, March 19th, 2007For my last quarter at RIT, I decided to take as few courses as possible to stay a full-time student (and thus keep my scholarships) and still graduate. Since I’m required to do a 2 credit honors project, I figured that if I also did a 2 credit independent study and took 2 other courses, I would have a total of 12 credits, which is full-time. To that end, I’ve decided to do an independent study around observable collections in Java. Time to put my money where my mouth is, I suppose.