There are some good things about Java. The virtual machine has been refined for quite some time. The garbage collector is likely to perform well. The standard library has gone through many iterations and is very encompassing and complete and amazingly well-documented. The community is enormous. The language is as […]

In the past I believe I may have said that Java was god-awful. I was mistaken. Java is far more evil than any god. Java sucks like the black, empty vacuum-void of nothing that existed before time began.
I’m tasked with maintaining and updating some Java code at work. Today I wandered […]

The SBCL download page shows version 1.0.14 released today, and it’s already in Portage (masked). The gentoo-lisp list says we got a new Lisp project lead recently. Looks like there’s plenty of Lisp going on in the Gentoo world. Personally I am very pleased with the state of Lisp in Gentoo.
Sometimes I […]

At night to relax I’ve still been reading about Common Lisp. There’s a lot to like about it.
But there’s one thing that drives me crazy:
Let’s define a variable: DEFVAR, DEFPARAMETER.
Let’s define a method: DEFMETHOD.
Let’s define a macro: DEFMACRO.
Let’s define a package: DEFPACKAGE.
Let’s define a class: DEFCLASS.
Let’s define a symbol macro: DEFSYMBOL Whoops, […]

At work recently (as in, yesterday) I was faced with the problem of re-writing a scientific app written in the mid-nineties. This thing was a full-screen DOS sort of app and today what with laptops and their widescreen huge-resolution displays, the program wasn’t readable for the average human being. All it does is […]

I found myself having to write a Java program this weekend. At first I tried to do it in Vim. I’ve decided that writing Java in Vim is approximately as enjoyable as having your eyebrows burned off.
So I tried out Eclipse 3.3. It’s actually quite a decent tool. It handles some […]

Previously I rambled about Ruby singleton classes. It turns out class instance variables are apparently actually recommended over class variables by many people. One big reason is that class variables are shared between classes and subclasses, which can lead to ugly behavior, but class instance variables are not. A google search leads […]

Another SCJP study chapter down. I no longer feel bad about missing some questions in the last chapter, because THIS chapter is the one that talks about abstract classes being able to implement interfaces etc. Nice to ask questions about things before actually covering them.
Those silly default no-arg constructors in Java. I […]

Note to self, Ubuntu uses GCJ for Java by default. To get Sun’s Java and set it as default,
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
sudo update-alternatives –config java

I plan to move to the west coast sometime within a few months, and that means job searching. That means time to hunker down and get this SCJP overwith. I don’t know if it’ll help me find a job, but it can’t hurt me. I’m going to keep track of what I […]