For a while we’ve watched Java programmers complain that Scala doesn’t have a whiz-bang eclipsy toolset already. Now some lovely Ruby people are looking at Scala, and the very first thing they must do (of course) is write the sacred unit tests: “At that point I had spent several hours getting simple unit testing working. I gave up and integrated JtestR. Lovely. Half of my project will now not be Scala. I imagine I would have learned more Scala by writing tests in it, than with the implementation. Apparently not.” How unlovely for a ruby-tinted imagination.

Wicket 1.3 is right around the corner and it has a refined sales pitch: “Apache Wicket makes developing web-apps simple and enjoyable again. Swap the boilerplate, complex debugging and brittle code for powerful, reusable components written with plain Java and HTML.” “Boilerplate” is certainly the buzzword of the moment and eliminating it is not the first thing Wicket brings to mind, but way back in the request-action coding age there was a boatload of boilerplate for shoving values into hashmaps so they could be rendered in the JSP “view”. Those were not the days!

Paisley forever: “There’s a Smalltalk-originated pattern called MVC, you may have heard of it being applied here and there. Smalltalk is pattern-free? Where would such confusion come from?” Well, MVC is strictly called a “paradigm” in the linked document, a heavy word that has since fallen out of fashion. The whole “pattern” business is ninety percent terminology, and twenty percent posturing. (It’s bloated.) When you’ve come to retroactively applying labels to defend the label itself, you know you’ve entered the realm of the truly useless. Also? That Rails and other request-oriented web libraries get to call themselves “MVC”, when they’ve got nothing of substance in common with the old Smalltalk paradigm of that name, is the best condemnation of the “universal vocabulary” blabber.

Dancing with the stars: ”I’ve accepted a permanent, full-time job with IBM. My primary duties are (drumroll….) CouchDB!” Very good news, as long as they don’t pull a Sun.

Wicket 1.3 released, yay. Do they realize how much work this means, actually having to release Databinder 1.1 now? And that’s the easy part. The hard part will be updating the site. Probably should update the ol’ app driving the site first, and…

Cobol 2 Enterprise Edition: “Spring 2.1 already supports C2EE using XML and/or annotations. In fact, by the time the JCP is done standardizing on JSR 666 you can expect to not give a damn.” :D

The mysterious Scala underscore: “Generally, a _ in an expression gets bound at the next outer pair of parens.”

Heresy! ”Scala is not a functional programming language. It has pretensions of being so, and it has adequate support for functional programming, but it only goes so far.” The post also points out some rough spots in the syntax and compiler. It’s refreshing to read some negative criticism that goes beyond the lack of a Scala valet service, finally. We hope to see those spots smoothed as much as they can be by the compiler, and even by changes to the JVM (in a fork if necessary). Update: Odersky responds!

Databinder 1.1 beta4, for Wicket 1.3.

Another complaint about the apalling lack of a Scala valet service: “The documentation is weak. … A book is in the works … I haven’t read any of it.” In established languages the books read themselves to you. “the Scala user community is not very helpful.” They won’t carry our groceries either. Jerks. “I found it to be very difficult to understand what Scala code was doing except for simple example cases.” After a whole two and a half months of functional programming? It sucks not being a genius—we can relate. And finally, with a sarcastic “lovely” that has become the standard climax of Scala tantrums, “… {_+_} Isn’t that lovely?” Yes it is!

Couch man is no fool: “So say what you want about IBM, but CouchDB will be a part that does not suck. When it comes to CouchDB and control, I’ve made sure not to get myself into a situation where I could lose my rights to keep working on CouchDB.” { previously }

In Defense of (0/:l)(_+_) in Scala. Isn’t she lovely?

Lift 0.4 released: “XMPP support … H2 to lift-ORM … PostgreSQL to lift-ORM … allow html fragment inlined into body to contribute to /html/head.” The last one should sound familiar to Wicket-heads. Is that the beginnings of a component framework or is Lift just happy to see us?

Hammering cliches: “when the only tool you have is birth control, all your problems start to look like this thing you can maybe have sex with.”

Mid-decade, we dared to hope that Nokia could compete with Apple in handheld computing to avoid us seeing how badly Apple would behave with monopoly power. Then the iPhone buried the N800, and the iPod touch killed its children. But! Those Finns do not give up so easily: “How about a multi-touch like mobile handset UI, that does not actually require touch, can track your hand movements in three dimen­sional space and even recognize 3D hand ges­tures?” Not only that, but they’ve already thought up copy and paste commands! The ’00s will have been Apple’s decade, but the next one is still up for grabs.

Domain in danger: “One of the things that separates Sequel from other ORMs is that you don’t really have to define model classes.”

Meraki free mesh WiFi network spreading across San Francisco. Meraki’s tech, originally conceived at MIT, is revolutionary stuff. Glad to see it’s getting a foothold!

Style enforcement: “what we [humans] have learned is that if we remove an individual’s authority to choose, we absolve them of respon­sibility for the result, and ultimately performance suffers greatly even if their skills are objectively high.” That’s too mild—let’s throw some gasoline on this fire!

The embarrassing type: “In short: Scala seems like the next over-hyped language. Just add the juicy bits of Scala to Groovy and throw that god awful syntax to the curb.” Spouting off about programming languages without consideration for—or awareness of?—the gulf between dynamic and static typing (particularly in terms of runtime performance on the JVM) is the new doing Austin Powers imitations. Redditors had plenty of fun with this one, natch, but that didn’t stop its author from cross-posting the beaut to JavaLobby.

Saint Gafter will keep fighting the good fight to add functional constructs to Java, but “for completely new code bases, we should also consider (and continue to develop) newer languages such as Scala, which benefit from the lessons of Java.” The frightfully reasonable Scala hype machine rolls on.

Great expectations: “According to Accenture, users are calling the shots, and Accenture is calling this new phenomenon user-determined computing.” Prediction: corporate IT will fracture into small contracts to compete with internet software. But because “information technology” is the only thing that matters in the future, large corporations themselves will rupture as their value is exported to software made by strangers all over the world.

Code Commit continues its series: Scala for Java Refu­gees. This ep is on OOP. It’s not a bad idea at all learn Scala’s improvements on old tricks before beaming up to functional land. Like, the fact that putting var before a constructor parameter makes an instant public property. The feature isn’t emphasized often because FPers hate var and mutable state in general, but if you’re migrating a code base or working with non-FP libraries (and who isn’t?), it sure comes in handy.

Databinder 1.1 is out and about. Its marquee feature must be the session factory refactor, allowing the use of external session managers, but who can remember after all this time? The DataServer is shockingly useful for its twenty or so lines of code (merely a configuration for an embedded Jetty server). Packaging a ready-to-serve main() class is a simple idea that, combined with a Buildr include, is so adorably handy the deployment primer has turned into a bloggy tribute. (Sorry for that!)

scala.List.foldLeft for Java programmers. Or, how to understand /: without giving yourself a hernia. Or, how to use “rubbish” as a verb, and other anglicisms.

Wicket Web Beans 1.0: “Major inclusions in this release are the finalizaton of the Databinder integration and Wicket 1.3.0 (final) support.”

Gigantic MacBook cocktail tray ruins January. In other news, the iPod touch is now sort of a computer so who cares about things that will barely fit in a huge inter-office mailer. Update: Wow, they are actually going to charge $20 for the new touch software, when the “old” software is barely four months so, and intentionally limited. Is there any doubt what Apple’s newfound love of locking is all about?

Apparently there is a backlash to the Air because “It’s not like a MacBook Pro!”, and a backlash to the backlash: “All software developers should be hailing the advent of the computer-as-appliance, because it means we’ll be reaching into markets that are afraid of self-service machines.” Well duh—if people are making such complaints they’re not worth responding to. What’s important in the future, and what we unfortunately have to wrestle Apple for, is the ability to change software on our appliances, not hard­ware. The Air’s problem is that is that it clings to one too many of Apple’s laptop trappings: a physically large screen. Commenter Dougie gets it. Go commenter Dougie! { previously }

So that’s how it works: scala.Option Cheat Sheet

Some reactions to the last post have popped up on reddit, a few even posing questions to “the author.” Hey guys. The author slaves away on a commenting system that doesn’t require registration or even a human test; if you want to ask him a question, do it there. Like always, most reactions are to either the headline or the first three ’graphs, ignoring the central argument (and praise for Lucene itself) half-way down. Which is why it’s better not to participate in a discussion about one’s writing on a linkage site, or even read it. Nor the counter links refuting an argument no one has made. Arghhh.

Something interesting on Seaside’s site (is this is tongue twister?): a widget like Wicket’s ModalWindow, except theirs is not ajax. Click on the orange bar chart (content may change) on the Seaside main page to see it. Jiminy—it’s a whole new resource location!

Sorry, communists, open source is not red: “the ownership of the means of production lies in the hands of a few, which is contrary to the communist ideal.”

Scala Pong: “Well, I’ve decided to enter the Java 4K Game contest again, but I didn’t use Java.”

Lucene troops rally around the unassailed idea that their project is wonderful and is used all kinds of other places that you can look up. So, who cares that they use Google for their own promotional site! { regarding }

The state of COBOL

Why the kids don’t want to program: “the goal of much of software engineering (‘mostly SEI-inspired’) is to remove all the fun out of programming.” { earlier }

Oh my God, so much political correctness, how will we ever navigate the terrible minefield of gender in programming? Chin up, buddy—it’s not so hard! If you approach the question without prejudice and accept the possibility of both bio­logical and social influences, you can actually have a productive discussion.

Denial is the first stage of recovery: “There is a culture of pretending business pro­gramming is more than it is. … You do a clerk’s job, you settle for a clerk’s working conditions and wages, but you take solace in the thought that you are some­how more than a clerk, because you have a univer­sity degree…” This is “programming” under the boot of software engineer­ing, as popularly applied. It’s not sexy. Raganwald further suggests that it isn’t even the best way to crank out software: “I don’t think it is in a business’s best interests to treat programmers as clerks”—Agreed!

Mixing metaphors: “If you work in enterprise, it is not likely that you were able to use ROR after the first alpha release … by the time you and your cohorts are ready to make the leap, the leap has become a step and the step after is the, let us hope gentle, downward slope. For example, I believe the ROR hype is now in full decline and new frameworks are filling the voices of the horde in the important nerd news aggregator sites such as reddit.” Leap becomes step: good? Gentle downward slope: good? Decline: bad? “work in enterprise”: Beam me up? ROR: Rowr! Nerd hordes: awesome.

A dynamic performance: “While a dynamic language will usually take some kind of performance and memory hit when running on top of VMs that were designed for statically-typed languages,” understatement alert! “work on the DLR and the MLVM … will reduce that.” Also this effort is promising. But the relief for applications is years away. Fact! So unless you just don’t care how fast your method calls are dispatched until 2010+ (and there’s a case for that too), you have to write in a language that can run optimally on an existing virtual machine. Neward knows this, of course. He just wrote an article about learning Scala for IBM.