When is compiling not compiling

I was annoyed by a post I read somewhere that talked about shells and compiling and why they don't like compiling etc...

Its 2008, and practically no modern programming tools really can't be made interpreted, or compiled as needed. The differences are fading (eg Java, C++ can all be made to work in shells if you like).

In my day job our rule engine is compiled, kinda. But to make the point that things can be totally interpreted, I wrapped a command line shell around the clips language module:

So there. Its actually becoming pretty handy. Also, Lisp dialects are soooo nice on the command line. Balanced expressions make the perfect unit to ship to the interpreter without trying to guess where it is up to.

STOP THE LOGGING MADNESS PLEASE !!

A personal pet peeve of mine is the proliferation of logging frameworks. Log4J was fine, but Sun had to go and not use it for the JDK. There is/was commons logging (which was not maintained) and now there is sl4j.

90% of libraries that have logging requirements should not have logging in them. I don't mean that they shouldn't *be able* to log, but they should do it via a callback interface (what would be a "closure" where you pass in a bit of code to be called when a log event occurs).

Instead what we have now are several jars needed to support different flavours of logging. Annoying.

I know lots of people have opinions on logging, and they shouldn't, they are wrong. Its a symptom of the problem known as "what colour should be the bike shed be". (Which is to say if you are thinking about it, you are not really thinking about what is important, and often times people do that because its a form of procrastination - instead of solving the problem at hand they obsess over trivial details).

So please, library authors, just stop it. Now. **

** EDIT: This includes me, I am very guilty of terrible crimes against humanity in this area.

Tech that makes people crazy

Lately I have been implementing a WebDAV filesystem. OH the pain. The frustration in trying to make it work right on different platforms (I am looking at you, OSX finder). Something about filesystems makes you go insane. Just look at Hans Reiser.

At the other extreme of the stack of technology, we have javascript. Something about JS makes people insane. I have lots of anecdotal evidence of crazy behaviour - DomAPI suddenly going proprietary, and of course the ExtJS fiasco where they tricked people into contributing to an LGPL project (with illegitimate and unenforceable additions to the LGPL licence) and then bait and switch to a GPL licence (upsetting as it took attention away from other toolkits which are under more liberal licences - heck if even started as a layer on YUI).

Well, its open source, so Use the Fork, Luke !

The tyranny of patents

I am a iphone user, and fan. Its my first experience with a "touch" user interface since I played with old HP machines back in the 80s (one of my school friends' dad was a HP executive and often had different models home to try out, which I loved).

There has been some talk as to why it has taken 20 or 30 years for touch UI to be an "overnight success". I think a big part of the reason is the patents involved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Development

Patents are a terrible, terrible thing for innovation. Having an idea is such a small part of innovation, especially in software as well (where the idea is pretty close to the implementation).

JavaOne 2008

I made the trek across "the ditch" to San Francisco for JavaOne 2008. Its pretty convenient from Sydney, direct flight, comfortable. What is not comfortable is the jet lag. I have never had it so bad, unbelievably bad.

Well the conference was not terribly exciting, but talking to everyone is always worth the effort. Its still very much Sun's conference, not the communities. Sun tend to have their influence everywhere - from their shoe-horning glassfish into all sorts of irrelevant places, and keynotes that "announce" tech that really have nothing to do with the community (JavaFX). That much is disappointing. Even the irrelevant fact that glassfish has a "kernel" of 98K was mentioned in the keynote ! What does that mean ! Nothing ! Its not really a kernel, but whatever. Sun seem to be driven partly out of spite, creating competing tech (or aquiring) - with no aim to make money, but only to compete etc.. Its not terribly surprising they are no longer making money - they had a terrible result recently. Terrible - makes me sad as they were a jewel of silicon valley once, and a good contributor to open source.

I liked JavaFX, would consider using it if it took off.

The most interesting thing all week was the Scala "lift off" conference I went to on saturday. I went with the express aim (and some preparation) to convince people how great it would be for scalac (compiler) to be able to have java and scala source mixed, including in IDE tooling. It turns out it is already on the way !

With such a smart group of people working on and around scala, and funded, it has a bright future. And not a moment too soon.

Melbourne demos

I was lucky enough to visit Melbourne, Australia's most livable city, and talk to a whole lot of people about drools stuff.



Unfortunately I had a raging cold the whole time, and was barely lucid, but I got to see the new Red Hat office, put faces to names etc. Room service is really nice when you are sick as a dog in bed.

One of the most interesting reflections I had on talking to people, was that open source isn't considered just because its open source (as in the fact that it is cheaper up front) but more on feature for feature merits. This is quite a change from years past.



The demonstrations of the BRMS and other new features went really well (surprisingly for me) - I was really happy with it (as were others).

While there I also joined, remotely, a Dallas user group for rule based tech users. That was quite interesting (James Owen was speaking) - I will definitely join next month as the timezone is perfect for me. Lots to learn...

I still have a nasty cold, but its on the mend, hopefully soon, as at the end of the week I am returning to Sydney (Blue Mountains to be more accurate). Whence I will spend my spare time scanning realestate.com.au and domain.com.au for a house to live in ;)

There presentation I did is here.

Travel and talks

I am speaking at the local ACS special interests group this Wednesday (the 25th). Next week I will be in Melbourne seeing various people, not sure if there are general meetups though (I have been ignoring email, a bad^H^H^H good habit of mine).

The week after we are moving to Sydney (after 4 years in Brisbane) so the times, they are a-changing.

Now I need to find some stuff to talk about (I really don't like demos - mostly cause I stop in the middle, crack open the code and change/fix something that is bugging me, not so great for the perplexed people watching).