Oh no! Not another programming language! Do I have to learn yet another one? Aren’t there enough already? I can understand your reaction. There are loads of programming languages, so why should you learn another? Here are five reasons why you should learn Erlang: • You want to write programs that run faster when you run them on a multicore computer. • You want to write fault-tolerant …
So what actually is F#? In a nutshell, F# is a multi-paradigm programming language built on .NET, meaning that it supports several different styles of programming natively. I’ll spare you the history of the language and instead just go over the big bullets: • F# supports imperative programming. In F# you can modify the contents of memory, read and write files, send data over the network, an…
So what actually is F#? In a nutshell, F# is a multiparadigm programming language built on .NET, meaning that it supports several different styles of programming natively. I’ll spare you the history of the language and instead just go over the big bullets: • F# supports functional programming, which is a style of programming that em- phasizes what a program should do, not explicitly how the…
Few entrepreneurs succeed in raising Angel or Venture Capital f i n a n c e . M a n y b u s i n e s s o w n e r s d o n ’ t b o t h e r t o a p p l y knowing that they won’t be successful. Others simply don’t need it and have an operation capable of generating the free cash flow they need to grow their business. Only a very few are able to meet the requirements of the Angel or Ventur…
Flex is a collection of technologies that enables you to rapidly build applications deployed to Flash Player, a run time environment for delivering sophisticated user interfaces and interactivity. Flex leverages existing, matured technologies and standards such as XML, web services, HTTP, Flash Player, and ActionScript. Even though Flex allows you to create complete rich Internet applications, …
The Java platform is arguably one of the most powerful and widely adopted ecosystems today. It has three significant pieces: • The Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which has become increasingly powerful and more performant over the years • The Java Development Kit (JDK), the rich set of third-party libraries and frameworks that help us effectively leverage the power of the platform • The se…
As a busy Java developer, you’re constantly looking for ways to be more productive, right? You’re probably willing to take all the help you can get from the platform and tools available to you. When I wax poetic about the “strength of Java,” I’m not talking about the language or its syntax. It’s the Java platform that has become more capable and more performant. To reap the benefit…
From the early days of the Internet’s mainstream breakout, the major search engines and ecommerce companies wrestled with ever-growing quantities of data. More recently, social networking sites experienced the same problem. Today, many organizations realize that the data they gather is a valuable resource for understanding their customers, the performance of their business in the marketplace,…
I started my professional development career in 1999, when I first was paid a salary to be a developer. (I don’t count the few years before that when I was just having fun playing around on the Web.) In 1999 the Web was a scary place. HTML files were loaded down with font and table tags. CSS was just coming on the scene. JavaScript1 was only a few years old, and a battlefield of various imple…
Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories pioneered the C programming language in the early 1970s. However, this programming language did not begin to gain widespread popularity and support until the late 1970s. This was because, until that time, C compilers were not readily available for commercial use outside of Bell Laboratories. Initially, this growth in popularity was also partly spurred by…
StandardMLisatype-safeprogramminglanguagethatembodiesmany innovative ideas in programming language design. It is a statically typed language, with an extensible type system. It supports polymorphic type inference, which all but eliminates the burden of specifying types of vari- ables and greatly facilitates code re-use. It provides efficient automatic storagemanagementfordatastructuresandfunct…
With the advent of version 2 of the iPhone system, Apple proved they could do a re- markable thing — adapt their existing Cocoa computer application programming framework to make applications for a touch-based device with limited memory and speed and a dauntingly tiny display. The resulting Cocoa Touch framework, in fact, turned out to be in many ways better than the original Cocoa. A program…
With the advent of version 2 of the iPhone system, Apple proved they could do a remarkable thing — adapt their existing Cocoa computer application programming framework to make applications for a touch-based device with limited memory and speed and a dauntingly tiny display. The resulting Cocoa Touch framework, in fact, turned out to be in many ways better than the original Cocoa. A programmi…
A programming framework has a kind of personality, an overall flavor that provides an insight into the goals and mindset of those who created it. When I first encountered Cocoa Touch, my assessment of its personality was: “Wow, the people who wrote this are really clever!” On the one hand, the number of built-in interface widgets was severely and deliberately limited; on the other hand, the…