With my most recent blog post, some of you were a little less than impressed with
the idea of using types, One reader, in particular, suggested that:

Your encapsulating type aliases don't... encapsulate :|

Actually, it kinda does. But not in the way you described.

using X = qualified.type;

merely introduces an alias, and will consequently (a) not prevent assignment of

a FirstName to a LastName (b) not even be detectible as such from CLI metadata

(i.e. using reflection).

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Recently, having been teaching C# for a bit at Bellevue College, I’ve been thinking
more and more about the way in which we approach building object-oriented programs,
and particularly the debates around types and type systems.

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In incarnations past, I have had debates, public and otherwise, with friends and colleagues
who have asserted that HTML5 (by which we really mean HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3) will
essentially become the platform of choice for all applications going forward—that
essentially, this time, standards will win out, and companies that try to
subvert the open nature of the web by creating their own implementations with their
own extensions and proprietary features that aren’t part of the standards, lose.

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As is pretty typical for that site, Lambda the Ultimate has a great discussion on some insights that the creators of Mozart and Oz have come to, regarding the design of programming languages; I repeat the post here for convenience:

Now that we are close to releasing Mozart 2 (a complete redesign of the Mozart system), I have been thinking about how best to summarize the lessons we learned about programming paradigms in CTM.

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• Feed: Interoperability Happens - Java
• Original article

Every once in a while, there is a moment in your life when inspiration just BAM! strikes out of nowhere, telling you what your next blog post is.

Then, there’s this one.

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There are times when the industry in which I find myself does things that I just don't understand.

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Charlie Kindel blogs that he thinks James Gosling (and the rest of Sun) screwed us all with Java and it's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" mantra. It's catchy, but it's wrong.

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While cruising through the Internet a few minute ago, I wandered across Meteor,
which looks like a really cool tool/system/platform/whatever for building modern web
applications. JavaScript on the front, JavaScript on the back, Mongo backing, it's
definitely something worth looking into, IMHO.

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TL;DR Live craftsmanship, don't preach it. The creation of a label serves no
purpose other than to disambiguate and distinguish. If we want to hold people accountable
to some sort of "professionalism", then we have to define what that means. I found
Uncle Bob's treatment of my blog heavy-handed and arrogant. I don't particularly want
to debate this anymore; this is my last take on the subject.

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TL;DR: To all those who dissented, you're right, but you're wrong. Craftsmanship is a noble meme, when it's something that somebody holds as a personal goal, but it's often coming across as a way to beat up and denigrate on others who don't choose to invest significant time and energy into programming. The Zen Masters didn't walk around the countryside, proclaiming "I am a Zen Master!"

Wow. Apparently I touched a nerve.

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I don't know Heather Arthur from Eve. Never met her, never read an article by her, seen a video she's in or shot, or seen her code. Matter of fact, I don't even know that she is a "she"--I'm just guessing from the name.

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Elliott Rusty Harold is blogging that functional programming in Java is dangerous. He's wrong, and he's way late to the party on this one--it's coming to Java whether he likes it or not.

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Once again, it's time for my annual prognostication and review
of last year's efforts. For those of you who've been long-time readers, you know
what this means, but for those two or three of you who haven't seen this before, let's
set the rules: if I got a prediction right from last year, you take a drink, and if
I didn't, you take a drink. (Best. Drinking game. EVAR!)

Let's begin....

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A little over a decade ago, Eugene Wallingford wrote a paper for the PloP '99 conference, describing the Envoy pattern language, "a pattern language for managing state in a functional program". It's a good read, but the implementation language for the paper is Scheme--given that it's a Lisp dialect, often isn't particularly obvious or easy to understand at first, I thought it might be interesting (both for me and any readers that wanted to follow along) to translate the implementation examples into a variety of diff

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I'm running into a weird situation in some Scala code I'm writing (more on why in
a later post), and I'm curious to know from my Scala-ish followers if this is a bug
or intentional/"by design".

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