Descent from the Summit

Just back from wallowing in geekery at another JVM Language Summit. These things always leave me overcaffeinated, exhausted, and completely thrilled.

My big discovery this year is that everyone more or less agrees on what the pain points in the JVM are, in terms of performance and convenience. The people who work on Oracle's (formerly Sun's) JVMs largely mentioned the same desiderata as the people who write languages for the JVM, which are also the things I've wanted as a library writer and occasional author of weird bytecode hacks. Those include structs and value types, arrays that behave well with type parameters and can themselves be value types, and unerased type arguments, all things I would have used recently if I had them.

Of course, just catching the attention of the movers and shakers doesn't mean a quick solution is around the corner. I attended a workshop in 1998 where many of the attendees were quite insistent that they needed value types, and James Gosling agreed and said they ought to go into Java “soon”…

The Psychology of Syntax: Lemon Meringue Pie, Functional-Style

A lemon meringue pie results from baking in a preheated oven for 10 minutes, or until golden brown, a baked pastry shell filled with a lemon filling produced by stirring and boiling until thick the whisked combination of egg yolks and a sugar mixture obtained from whisking together sugar, flour, cornstarch, and salt and adding water, lemon juice, and zest topped with a meringue, spread to seal the edges at the crust, created by whipping until peaks form the mixture resulting from gradually adding sugar to egg whites whipped until foamy.

Functional style is mathematically elegant, but except in small doses, most people find imperative style a lot more readable (as in the original from which this recipe was derived).

Bon appétit!