Author Archive

Lean startup language design

At a recent hackathon I was noodling around with Dart. I thought, it was great that Google made it particularly easy to start playing with their new language by putting an interactive shell – the Dartboard – on its home page. No download, no installation, instant coding. Very nice. On the other hand they made [ READ MORE ]

Kotlin and Ceylon to open their doors by the end of the year

The residents of Java are waiting. Waiting for the day when another city will rise to supremacy in JVMland. These days they are looking north towards the functional territories and watch with interest as the new cities Kotlin and Ceylon are being built. Many Java inhabitants are tired of the city they live in. Not just since [ READ MORE ]

The functional breakthrough … the back door

Ever since my first encounter with Haskell in my very first week at university I have been waiting for functional programming to become more widely spread and to find acceptance in the industry. Still… waiting… Playing around with Scala these days, I have come as close as ever to use functional programming for something non-academic. [ READ MORE ]

Conway’s Game of Life in Scala

I attended a Code Retreat yesterday in Hamburg. As usual we used Conway’s Game of Life to practice our coding skills. I planned to do at least one session using Scala, but my Scala IDE wasn’t working any more, probably due to an incompatible upgrade of some description. So, today I took the time to get my IDE up [ READ MORE ]

CI Gossip: Is Hudson asking Jenkins out again?

After the recent divorce of Hudson and Jenkins following the tragical death of Hudson’s mother Sun and a long battle over trademark rights, Hudson seems to have come to senses and is planning to hand over the code to Eclipse. I’ve seen Jenkins’ father Kohsuke in Hamburg earlier this week where he presented some stats [ READ MORE ]

The Bowling Game Kata in Scala

Here is the end result of my implementation of the Bowling Game Kata in Scala. You can see all steps including the tests on CodersDojo.org. Comparing this piece of code with the Java implementation from Uncle Bob (who, no doubt, knows how to write clean Java code) I would conclude that it is more expressive [ READ MORE ]

How to make your Scala code less imperative and more functional

When first starting out with Scala after programming in Java for many years chances are you are still writing Java code just in Scala syntax. Meaning you are not leveraging all the functional goodness that is Scala. Functional code is usually more concise and can be more expressive than imperative code, because functional language constructs [ READ MORE ]

Question everything you do

I realized that I follow a certain plan of attack when confronted with a task. I ask myself the following questions: Why am I doing this? The first thing I do is to ask myself why I am carrying out the given task. This is mostly about trying to understand the task and the problem [ READ MORE ]

How to make changes to rotten legacy code

Wouldn’t it be great to start a project from scratch? Use all the latest technologies, design and write the software TDD-style, as the creator intended? Well… yes, but this isn’t your dream world, this is reality. And here we have to deal with existing software (aka legacy software) most of the time. Unfortunately, this software [ READ MORE ]

Distributed CI: How it could work

I think distributed CI is the logical next step in the evolution of Continuous Integration by getting rid of the manual step of running a private build on the developer machine before committing to the master repository. Here is how I imagine this might work. Managers, developers and customers (or all stakeholders if you will) [ READ MORE ]

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