Java

There’s a hole in my abstraction, dear Liza, dear Liza

By jonskeet

I had an interesting day at work today. I thought my code had broken… but it turns out it was just a strange corner case which made it work very slowly. Usually when something interesting happens in my code it’s quite hard to blog about it, because of all the confidentiality issues involved. In this case, it’s extremely easy to reproduce the oddity in an entirely vanilla manner. All we need is the Java collections API. I have a set – a HashSet, in fact. I want to remove some items from it… and many of the items may well … Continue reading There’s a hole in my abstraction, dear Liza, dear Liza

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)?

A different approach to inappropriate defaults

By jonskeet

I’ve had a couple of bug reports about my Protocol Buffers port – both nicely detailed, and one including a patch to fix it. (It’s only due to my lack of timeliness in actually submitting the change that the second bug report occurred. Oops.) The bug was in text formatting (although it also affected parsing). I was using the default ToString behaviour for numbers, which meant that floats and doubles were being formatted as "50,15" in Germany instead of "50.15". The unit tests caught this, but only if you ran them on a machine with an appropriate default culture. Aaargh. … Continue reading A different approach to inappropriate defaults

Language proliferation

By jonskeet

I’ve always been aware that .NET supports multiple languages (obviously) and that Microsoft has been experimenting with this to some extent. It’s only recently struck me just to what extent this is the case though. Here’s a list – almost certainly incomplete – of .NET languages from Microsoft alone. C# VB (or VB.NET if you wish) C++/CLI F# IronPython IronRuby Spec# M (with Oslo) Axum Managed JScript PowerShell Cω J# (not shipping any more, I believe) Some of these are research languages which are more important for the ideas they’ve contributed to more mainstream ones at a later date than … Continue reading Language proliferation

What’s in a name?

By jonskeet

T.S. Eliot had the right idea when he wrote “The naming of cats”: The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,It isn’t just one of your holiday games…When you notice a cat in profound meditation,The reason, I tell you, is always the same:His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplationOf the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:His ineffable effableEffanineffableDeep and inscrutable singular Name. Okay, so developers may not contemplate their own names much, but I know I’ve certainly spent a significant amount of time recently trying to work out the right name for various types and … Continue reading What’s in a name?

Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object

By jonskeet

I’ve had quite a few discussions with a colleague about some failures of Java and .NET. The issue we keep coming back to is the root of the inheritance tree. There’s no doubt in my mind that having a tree with a single top-level class is a good thing, but it’s grown a bit too big for its boots. Pretty much everything in this post applies to both .NET and Java, sometimes with a few small changes. Where it might be unclear, I’ll point out the changes explicitly – otherwise I’ll just use the .NET terminology. What’s in System.Object? Before … Continue reading Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object

Data Structures and Algorithms: new free eBook available (first draft)

By jonskeet

I’ve been looking at this for a while: Data Structures and Algorithms: Annotated reference with examples. It’s only in “first draft” stage at the moment, but the authors would love your feedback (as would I). Somehow I’ve managed to end up as the editor and proof-reader, although due to my holiday the version currently available doesn’t have many of my edits in. It’s a non-academic data structures and algorithms book, intended (as I see it, anyway) as a good starting point for those who know that they ought to be more aware of the data structures they use every day … Continue reading Data Structures and Algorithms: new free eBook available (first draft)

Automatic lambda expressions

By jonskeet

This morning I happened to show a colleague (Malcolm Rowe) the neat trick of using nullable types and the null-coalescing operator (??) to implement compound comparisons in C#. He asked whether it wouldn’t have been nicer to make this a library feature rather than a language feature. I’m all for putting features into libraries where possible, but there’s a problem in this case: the ?? operator doesn’t evaluate its right operand unless the left operand evaluates to null. This can’t be replicated in a library. Or can it? The obvious way to lazily evaluate an expression is to turn it … Continue reading Automatic lambda expressions

The Beauty of Closures

By jonskeet

Fairly soon I’m going to write a blog post comparing the different proposals under consideration for Java 7 when it comes to closures. I thought it would be worth writing some background material on it first though, so I’ve put an article on the C# in Depth site. I’m not entirely comfortable that I’ve captured why they’re important, but the article can mature over time like a good wine. The idea is to counter the Blub Paradox (which I hadn’t come across before, but I agree with completely – it’s part of the effect I believe Steve McConnell was fighting … Continue reading The Beauty of Closures