Comments for The Shyam!

Comment on Software Engineering vs Software Artistry by Shrini Kulkarni

Shrini Kulkarni — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:05:07 +0000

>>>Maybe we will be closer to being engineers in another 100 years? After all, civil engineering has been here for quite some time now.

Why there is tendency towards painting the process of making, using and maintaining software, necessarily as an “engineering” pursuit? Where do you see making software has parallels with say … producing a car or a building a bridge?

Coming to civil engineering … software is reified, invisible, can’t see, touch… does that make a difference?

software gets made and used in a “social sciences” environment with very little parallels with engineering.

It is the time that we stop comparing software as an engineered product…

Shrini

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Shyam

Shyam — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:03:18 +0000

Yes, Java is more verbose and requires more line of code. Reading is easier. BUt my point is that. Why do more lines of code when it can be done more cleanly and clearly in less. This is one of my biggest problems with Java / GWT. There are so many layers of marshalling code and so little of the actual business logic. Getting data from a DB and displaying it in the UI should be the easiest thing, and it is usually not the case

Comment on APIs and what not to do by Shyam

Shyam — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:00:31 +0000

I can, but thats not the point. If all I’m going to do with a GWT Tree is always wrap it, why not wrap it to begin with. And yes, SWT / JFace does it right. Completely agree on that point

Comment on APIs and what not to do by Sven Meier

Sven Meier — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:27:35 +0000

Don’t be too harsh on the GWT tree.

You can easily implement a small wrapper which offers what you’re looking for: be it a provider, TreeModel or any other pull mechanism.

IMHO SWT/jFace does it right:
A low level API like the GWT tree and a higher API similar to what JSF is offering.

Comment on What I miss in Java by APIs and what not to do « The Shyam!

APIs and what not to do « The Shyam! — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:42:01 +0000

[...] new list. Now I realize that Java doesn’t make it easy to pass in functions (check my older article about this) as arguments, but what I really really want here is the ability to do [...]

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Dmitry Nikolaev

Dmitry Nikolaev — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:53:52 +0000

Generally, you want say that java is more verbose. Java required more lines of code. But I think this is what we may train. Our perception of code. It very (very) easy achieve, if you adopt your IDE setting for you (typography). This make reading of code more easier!

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Misko Hevery

Misko Hevery — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:38:58 +0000

Glad you are coming around.

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Philip Peitsch

Philip Peitsch — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:17:55 +0000

Not all those features are restricted to dynamic languages. C# implements Closures / Functions (lambda expressions and delegates are the terms used).

It sounds like a lot of your issues with static typing are with Java’s implementation… I’d definitely encourage you to look at some alternative statically typed languages if you can. I think that Java (though definitely a useful language), does a lot to make static typing painful. This is coming from someone who grew up on Java through Uni, then had to do a stack of development in C#. I still use both languages on a regular basis… but C# is definitely more “fun” to use due to some of the improvements made.

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Graham Fawcett

Graham Fawcett — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:34:19 +0000

It’s “static typing” you’re talking about, not “strong typing”. You can have a dynamic, strongly-typed language. Python is one of many examples.

I’d avoid talking about ’strong typing’ because it’s ambiguous — it means very different things to different people.

Regarding your subpoints: neither strong nor static typing prevents (or enables) the use of closures: that’s entirely orthogonal to types.

Comment on Is Strong Typing really needed? by Shyam

Shyam — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:13:09 +0000

I have played around with Scala enough to say I think its a great improvement over Java in many cases. But I haven’t used it for long periods of time to have strong opinions about the things I like or don’t like. But I love the concepts of val vs var, where making things immutable is easy and almost like the default option. Mixins are awesome as well.