Stephans Blog

Some blogs and mailing lists are full of a discussion about the innovations in Arc. One partial consensus seems to be ‘to little, to late’ at least for an magnum opus. If you want to see an firework of innovation in programming languages, take a look at Wouter van Oortmerssens programming language page. You absolutely […]

Functional programming is heating up. In several discussions over the blogosphere and on my blog others think I have no clue what functional programming is. After some consideration, I think they are right. I have no clue.
Well I do know what functional programming is. I’ve used it myself. But I have no clue how to […]

“Character sets are a peripheral matter. The only reason they loom so large in the average programmer’s life is that, though trivial, they’re an enormous time suck. Trivial + time consuming. Sounds like a good thing to postpone.”

He has absolutely no clue about unicode. I and every other Java developer has been using unicode for […]

Tada-List was written in 579 lines of Rails code. Jeff of Coding Horror writes “[…], I agree with Joseph: it’s an impressive achievement, […]”. I’m not impressed. If you write a framework for a narrow group of applications, it should be easy to write a small target application with a few lines of code. And […]

When browsing and reading code, I often find this:

Date currentDate = new Date();

Someone needs a current date. The line is unclear what the developer really wanted to achieve. Does he want the current date or the current time? The Date class in Java is ambiguous: “The class Date represents a specific instant in time, with […]

As people have a need to mention Python and Javascript in mails and comments, as if I’ve never seen them beofre, I just checked my book shelf. The “Javascript-The Definitive Guide” says January 1997: Second Edition, “Programming Python” says October 1996: First Edition, “Java in a Nutshell” says May 1997: Second Edition, I’ve lost the […]

On Lambda the ultimte there is a recent post with a language prediction for 2008, which mainly predicts the rise of functional programming and the rise of Scala in particular: “My prediction is a little bit more conservative, but I predict Scala will gain momentum, and at least one high visibility project will use Scala”. […]

I’ve recently started to read the best book on object oriented programming. There are other good books that deepen your understanding of OO like “Refactoring” and “P of EAA” from Fowler, “Design Patterns” from the GoF, the McConnell books, “The Pragmatic Programmer”, the OO books from Robert C. Martin and some others. All recommended to […]

Thanks to all the regular readers of this blog for listening. I know 200 is not as many readers as others have, but I’m thankful for everyone of you (including those with comments who prove me wrong :-)
For those interested the FeedBurnger graph for 2007:

For post listed on DZone the daily readership peaks to 1000-2000.
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Adding to my last post about BigDecimal and money, and why to never use double, I discovered a BigDecimal Cookbook for financial calculations. Splendid.
Update:: Found The Need for BigDecimal for money caluclations and Representing money.
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