New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease [...]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy [...]
Now for something quite different from the philosophical entries I’ve been writing recently. We finally got the time to release the game “JTron” on Sourceforge. It is there under its new name Jtronic. This game is designed for programming competitions; participants program an agent that plays the game by obtaining information about its environment and [...]
One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying in the past year has been type theory. I feel that type theory is an area where a lot of separate fields can come together in a good design. In strongly typed languages, language implementation efficiency, syntax and language semantics all leave essential marks in the [...]
Academics and practitioners, having rather different goals in life, tend to approach software development in quite different ways. No doubt there are many things each side of the fence can learn from the other, but I think academics in particular could often benefit quite a lot by adopting some of the practices used in industrial [...]
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