Re: Factor: XKCD. If you want to get an impression of one of the crazier languages - John Benediktssons Blog has a lot of example snippets in Factor, which are usually directly usable in the Factor REPL (or create manageable vocabulary extensions). I am always impressed by the compactness of Factor code. John's code also has the advantage that I can usually understand what is happening - Slavas code, for example, is often much more idiomatic and therefore cryptic for me. But this is certainly also due to the fact that Slava usually writes about the internals of the language, while John simply describes small tricks.
Archive 14. April 2011
Significantly increased radiation in the Asse. Why do atomic energy representatives still believe they have to advocate for atomic energy when we are not even capable of operating a storage facility for low and medium radioactive materials like the Asse safely and without problems? After all, this is a storage facility in a highly industrialized country that, according to the claims of atomic energy advocates, has the highest competence in atomic energy. Why does a reactor have to blow up in Japan for people to realize that our perfect atomic world is not as perfect as it seems? When we have all the problems right in front of our own door (and behind it)!
Akka Project. And I definitely had that on the old blog before, but never mind, everything is repeated on TV all the time. And a lot has happened with Akka lately, and it is increasingly establishing itself as the future platform for fault-tolerant systems on the JVM. Many parallels with Erlang's ideas, but with the broader JVM-typical platform (there is hardly anything for which there is not some Java class library and thus also for Scala). Very interesting: Akka brings an implementation of Software Transactional Memory for the Java platform.
Programming Scala. I think I already had this one, but never mind: the second online freely available book about Scala that I stumbled upon today. You can also read it alongside the other one, but it's at a similar language level (i.e., before 2.8).
ScalaQuery. Yes, Scala-Day today. One of the things I was missing so far was a good integration of databases that also makes use of the DSL features and type safety of Scala. So not just sending SQL around via JDBC, but something like LINQ, only for Scala. This looks quite nice.
Programming in Scala, First Edition. And since I have Scala on my mind: the first edition of Programming in Scala is now freely available on the web. Of course, it lacks some things that came with the current Scala version (especially the container libraries are indeed different in 2.8), but it is still certainly a good starting point to read into the language.
Scala IDE for Eclipse. Hmm, it seems that the tools are starting to develop there. I don't have anything against command lines in general and feel more at home on them than in IDEs, but for the general acceptance of languages, IDEs are quite practical. And Scala is still one of the more interesting languages in the JVM environment, even if it has become quite quiet about it in recent times.