An interview I did with Paul Hudak that begins with a discussion of when to introduce difficult Haskell concepts like monads, moves to a discussion of the philosophy of higher order programming, the success and influence of Haskell, its use in the mainstream, and concludes with the idea of teaching computer music and Haskell simultaneously.
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/paul-hudak-haskell-Qcon-SF-08&language=en
A great discussion I had with Don Syme at QCon SF. Don is one of the heroes to thank for .Net generics and he is a major contributor to F# design, Thanks Don!
Erik Meijer talks about less known LINQ features, like meta programming, about the differences between functional languages and OO ones, asynchronous computation, and others.
Around 750 people commented on the online preview of the Real World Haskell book. As described by one of its co-authors, John Goerzen, in a recent interview to O’Reilly, the book introduces Haskell with real code, real examples and tips to exploit in a business environment. In his interview, Goerzen explains why, in his opinion, this language is worth learning; he provides insights into its specificities and addresses some issues that may be a source of reluctance.
In the beginning of last year, Ehud Lamm launched on Lamba the Ultimate a thread about programming languages predictions for 2008. Several subjects popped up: concurrency, functional programming, future of Java, Ruby, C++, and many others… What really happened in 2008 and what are the prospects for 2009? Bloggers have addressed these questions on demand of James Iry, echoing at last year thread.
Tony Hoare, Inventor of QuickSort, Turing Award Winner
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. In recent years, a number of program analysers like PREfix and PREfast in Microsoft have been used to check references, and give warnings if there is a risk they may be non-null. More recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in 1965.
Yet another clueless manager
Nov 17, 2008 9:33 AM by Ilya Sterin
First, methodologies are only as good as the people that apply them. I hate the thought of process over people. Intelligent people will find a way to produce good software, agile or not. Morons will fail even with the process. Software development is more art than it is science, though I wish the people that never made it as software developers would stop trying to pile process on top of process and think that engineers are code monkeys that can develop good software by following some process. Process is good, but smart people are better.
Also, it’s not that agile is failing, software projects are failing and have been failing before agile and will be failing after. Again, this is art and creativity is required not process.
Thanks Ilya for the comment!
Dan Pritchett suggests that analyzing streams of events using Event Stream Processor could be an interesting alternative solution to data warehousing applications, which have, in his opinion, important downsides in terms of cost, scalability and reactivity.
This is an interview I did at QCon with Ted Neward. Talking to Ted was very interesting even though arguing with him turned to be not easy at all :)
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