/var/log/mind

I read two completely disconnected posts roughly at the same time, one related to software architects and another to socio-biology - viz. “The five types of poor architects†and “New discovery proves ‘Selfish Gene’ exists†and I was wondering if architects and managers suffer from a Selfish Gene syndrome ? Now I am obviously stretching [...]

Seems like a nice term doesn’t it - Polyglot programming. Some recent posts related to it are Kill Java, Vol. 2 and Fractal Programming It may seem hot, it may seem in and it may make sense for you. However please allow me to lay down the fine print. Polyglot programming requires to build bridges across [...]

I have 8+ years experience on C++ and Java each and at least consider myself an expert on the latter and used to consider myself one on the former a long time back. For any programmer it is a difficult choice to move away from the platform and the environment in which one has both [...]

This post gives you a small tip which just might make a world of difference to your java hashmap’s performance. This trick has been inspired by the “symbol†construct in Ruby language. I have often considered using hash maps using Strings as keys as quite expensive indeed. And in many ways they often are. However if [...]

A lot of people are wondering whether Java is under threat from a set of nimble languages - PHP / Ruby / Python / Perl. There is a flurry of activity relating to Whether Java is losing the battle for the modern web lot of which are being driven from the earlier post by Andi [...]

Mark Dennehy blogs about passion in the context of programming in The case against passion. Took me a while to figure out what he wanted to get at but I think he’s completely mixed up two orthogonal aspects. Programming is not all about passion. Passion is the antithesis of good programming A yes to the first statement. [...]

It has not been rare to come across situations where loyalties to one’s profession and to the organisation one is working for may end up “seeming†at odds. On rare occasions, I have run into advice or opinions which sometimes were either questionable at best or unethical at worst. While I used my common sense, [...]

Eugene responded to my earlier post An even more capable SafeHashMap with It is safer not to invent safe hash map / Java. While he does make some valid points I did have issues with some others, the issues being Signature Instability, Compilation Troubles, Principle of Least Surprise and Style. Extending predefined collection classes What bugs me [...]

Eric Redmond in his post A Safe HashMap for Java describes a SafeHashMap Here’s a suggestion to extend the capabilities of the same. Lets look at the code. Define an interface to create an instance. First, I create a new interface (We’ll get to know why very soon). public interface InstanceProvider<K,V> { public V createNew(K k); } The SafeMap class itself Here’s the [...]

Acknowledgement There are a couple of helpful posts that set me off on the path to blog this so here’s the acknowledgement : Facebook vs. OpenSocial OpenSocial and Facebook Platform side by side comparison Introduction I have been spending some time on the Facebook and OpenSocial platforms, and while these both attempt to solve the same need, they end up [...]