Lab Rat Code

My older son has gone back to school to study IT, and we occasionally discuss his courses or internship (though not his homework). As a graphic artist, musician, gamer, and box-builder, he is an experienced user, but thinking as a programmer is new to him. Therefore I find his perspective on programming an interesting counterpoint [...]

BuilderBuilder: The Model in Java

This post will describe a tiny Java model for implementing the BuilderBuilder task. It is simple almost to the point of crudity, because the goal of the series is to compare languages and styles, not to produce production-ready sample code. This post will focus on the parts of the overall data flow highlighted below: The [...]

“Linguistics” vs. Mathematics?

I happened across an interesting post on Chris Okasaki’s blog, titled Less than vs Greater than. Let me suggest that you read it before continuing here. I would paraphrase his point about errors he observed in students’ programs as follows: A student who writes an expression such as expL < expR often appears to lock [...]

Scala and Programming 2.0

I commented elsewhere on how the “Architecture of Participation” idea may be percolating into the field of programming languages. I am especially interested in seeing whether the adoption of Scala provides evidence of this phenomenon. Scala is a strongly, statically typed language implemented on the JVM—all characteristics that raise eyebrows (if not noses) in some [...]

Stanford on Stairs

Stanford University has a student-led course on “Cross-Paradigm Programming with Scala” this Spring. The resource list on their page has a number of must-reads, including the draft Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners, and the draft scala.xml book by Burak Emir. They’ve also scheduled a guest lecture by David [...]

Language(s) for teaching programming

I’ve seen (and participated in) a number of discussions recently about the selection of a first programming language. I don’t think the choice is a trivial matter, and don’t necessarily think there’s a single right answer, depending on the overall goals of a curriculum. Here are some choice strategies I’ve seen discussed recently: Commercially-popular language [...]