Month: November 2009

Custom value types are like buses

By jonskeet

You wait years to write one… and then six of them come along at once. (Cross-posted to the Noda Time blog and my coding blog as it’s relevant to both.) When we started converting Joda Time to .NET, there was always going to be the possibility of using custom value types (structs) – an opportunity which isn’t available in Java. This has meant reducing the type hierarchy a fair amount, but that’s actually made things simpler. However, I didn’t realise quite how many we’d end up with – or how many would basically just wrap a long. So far, we … Continue reading Custom value types are like buses

Where do you benefit from dynamic typing?

By jonskeet

Disclaimer: I don’t want this to become a flame war in the comments. I’m coming from a position of ignorance, and well aware of it. While I’d like this post to provoke thought, it’s not meant to be provocative in the common use of the term. Chapter 14 of C# in Depth is about dynamic typing in C#. A couple of reviewers have justifiably said that I’m fairly keen on the mantra of "don’t use dynamic typing unless you need it" – and that possibly I’m doing dynamic typing a disservice by not pointing out more of its positive aspects. … Continue reading Where do you benefit from dynamic typing?

Just how spiky is your traffic?

By jonskeet

No, this isn’t the post about dynamic languages I promise. That will come soon. This is just a quick interlude. This afternoon, while answering a question on Stack Overflow1 about the difference between using an array and a Dictionary<string, string> (where each string was actually the string representation of an integer) I posted the usual spiel about preferring readable code to micro-optimisation. The response in a comment – about the performance aspect – was: Well that’s not so easily said for a .com where performance on a site that receives about 1 million hits a month relies on every little … Continue reading Just how spiky is your traffic?

Noda Time gets its own blog

By jonskeet

I’ve decided it’s probably not a good idea to make general Noda Time posts on my personal blog. I’ll still post anything that’s particularly interesting in a "general coding" kind of way here, even if I discover it in Noda Time, but I thought it would be good for the project to have a blog of its very own, which other team members can post to. I still have plenty of things I want to blog about here. Next up is likely to be a request for help: I want someone to tell me why I should love the "dynamic" … Continue reading Noda Time gets its own blog

Noda Time is born

By jonskeet

There was an amazing response to yesterday’s post – not only did readers come up with plenty of names, but lots of people volunteered to help. As a result, I’m feeling under a certain amount of pressure for this project to actually take shape. The final name chosen is Noda Time. We now have a Google Code Project and a Google Group (/mailing list). Now we just need some code… I figured it would be worth explaining a bit more about my vision for the project. Obviously I’m only one contributor, and I’m expecting everyone to add there own views, … Continue reading Noda Time is born

What’s in a name (again)?

By jonskeet

I have possibly foolishly decided to stop resisting the urge to port Joda Time to .NET. For those of you who are unaware, "use Joda Time" is almost always the best answer to any question involving "how do I achieve X with java.util.Date/Calendar?" It’s a Java library for handling dates and times, and it rocks. There is a plan to include a somewhat redesigned version in some future edition of Java (JSR-310) but it’s uncertain whether this will ever happen. Now, .NET only gained the ability to work with time zones other than UTC and the local time zone (using … Continue reading What’s in a name (again)?

Revisiting randomness

By jonskeet

Almost every Stack Overflow question which includes the words "random" and "repeated" has the same basic answer. It’s one of the most common "gotchas" in .NET, Java, and no doubt other platforms: creating a new random number generator without specifying a seed will depend on the current instant of time. The current time as measured by the computer doesn’t change very often compared with how often you can create and use a random number generator – so code which repeatedly creates a new instance of Random and uses it once will end up showing a lot of repetition. One common … Continue reading Revisiting randomness

OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail)

By jonskeet

(Meta note: I tried to fix the layout for this, I really did. But my CSS skills are even worse than Tony’s. If anyone wants to send me a complete sample of how I should have laid this out, I’ll fix it up. Otherwise, this is as good as you’re going to get 🙂 Last week at Stack Overflow DevDays, London I presented a talk on how humanity had made life difficult for software developers. There’s now a video of it on Vimeo – the audio is fairly poor at the very start, but it improves pretty soon. At the … Continue reading OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail)