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One Div Zero: January 2012

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An exploration of software development. Thursday, January 5, 2012. Type Errors as Warnings. Paul Snively and I are having a bit of disagreement about the value of treating type errors as warnings during development. It's hard to make anything like a cohesive point on Twitter so I thought I'd write a quickie post on what I mean and why I think it's valuable. Int foo(String x) { return x*2; }. Would get an error report and be replaced by the equivalent of. Edit: Clarifications and Rebuttals. If a compiler ...

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One Div Zero: March 2013

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An exploration of software development. Tuesday, March 26, 2013. King Null the Stubborn. Class Base { public Base() { System.out.println(message().length() ; } public String message() { return "Hello"; } } class Sub extends Base{ final String msg; public Sub() { msg = "HI! Override public String message() { return msg; } } class Test { public static void main(String[] args) { new Sub(); } }. And that crashes with a nice null pointer exception even though null is nowhere to be found. Class Base def initia...

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One Div Zero: June 2011

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An exploration of software development. Friday, June 17, 2011. The world's stupidest, racy sort algorithm. Ported to Scala actors for no good reason. Import scala.actors. import Actor. def sleepSort(xs : List[Int]) : List[Int] = { def sorter(aggregator : Actor, n : Int) = actor { reactWithin(n * 1000) { case TIMEOUT = { aggregator! Scala sleepSort(List(3,1,2) res0: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3). Posted by James Iry. Links to this post. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). San Francisco, CA, United States.

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One Div Zero: March 2012

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An exploration of software development. Wednesday, March 7, 2012. Posted by James Iry. Links to this post. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). San Francisco, CA, United States. If cars were built like software then.well, I don't know squat about building cars so who knows. It might be kinda cool. But probably not. View my complete profile. Link In My Profile.

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One Div Zero: February 2013

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An exploration of software development. Friday, February 15, 2013. The Best-Laid Schemes O' Mice An' Constructors Gang Aft Agley. Val temp0 = expr0 val temp1 = expr1 val temp2 = try/catch t0.foo(temp1, temp2). And to do that recursively as needed. It was a great plan. A beautiful plan. It had only one flaw. Under some circumstances it would change the behavior of some constructors calls. To understand why we need to look at some JVM bytecode. At the bytecode level, the constructor call. At first glance t...

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One Div Zero: July 2010

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An exploration of software development. Tuesday, July 20, 2010. Occasionally somebody will suggest that statically typed language X (Java, C#, Scala, F#, whatever) would be better off with C 's "const", a type qualifer that supposedly makes objects immutable in certain contexts[1]. I'm not convinced. Const requires a fair amount of work and provides fairly small guarantees. This post is a bit of literate C program demonstrating some of the weaknesses in const. Int count() const{ return count; } };. These...

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One Div Zero: February 2012

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An exploration of software development. Wednesday, February 15, 2012. Checked Exceptions Might Have Their Place, But It Isn't In Java. Even within the Java community checked exceptions have been at least somewhat deprecated. Spring and Hibernate, for instance, moved strongly away from checked exceptions. Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, considers them a mistake and Joshua Block, author of Effective Java, cautions against overuse. The java.util.Iterator methods, for instance, aren't declar...The t...

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One Div Zero: November 2010

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An exploration of software development. Wednesday, November 10, 2010. My company uses a centralized version control system. It works reasonably well, but of course has all the downsides of centralized VCS. So I wanted to explain how I use a local version control system to supplement even if there isn't a real "bridge" like git-svn. Before I start let me sum up why you might want to. It can be hard to get the manager of a centralized version control system to create branches for your experiments. And ...

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One Div Zero: April 2010

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An exploration of software development. Monday, April 12, 2010. C Is Not Assembly. In my last article. I dug down into some of the joys of undefined pointer behavior in C. But I did it in the context of an architecture that most developers aren't too likely to ever see again, the Intel 8086. I wanted to show that this stuff matters even with more mainstream architectures because compilers are free to do a lot of non-obvious things. C is not assembly. In the C language, given the following types:. Are opt...

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One Div Zero: May 2010

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An exploration of software development. Thursday, May 27, 2010. Who Will Throw the Hammer This Time? During the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple released an ad. Where gray, drab people are transfixed on a giant screen with a talking head who tells them how utopian their uniform world is. A female athlete jogs in and throws a hammer. At the screen, the screen explodes, and a new voice announces the release of the Apple Macintosh. The ad riffed off of the George Orwell dystopian novell Nineteen Eighty-Four. So we co...