Scala for Java Guys

I've been programming in Scala a lot lately and I continue to be impressed with the enormous amount of thought and care that went into the language and its libraries.  If you're a Java programmer that's interested in making a move into a more productive language, you've got to give Scala a try.  Odersky and his team have done an amazing job of maintaining the best of the Java experience while moving the state of the art in JVM programming forward by leaps and bounds.

There's a significant amount of new material to learn when moving to Scala, but as you develop a feel for the bigger Scala picture you'll begin to realize that it's simpler than Java itself in some fundamental ways.  I won't try to convey the Scala landscape in this short post.  Instead, I suggest this presentation I found over the weekend.

Check out slides 76 and 77 for a dramatic illustration of how concise things can be in Scala.

The Beginning of the Health Care Battle

Tonight, on the eve of the beginning of the healthcare battle (yes, the beginning) I ran across Bob Beckel's shameless article on health care "reform".  At the beginning he makes the following statement:

For fifty years we Democrats have sought to make health care a right not a privilege for all Americans.

In response a commenter going by the name "lifeliberty" said,

 I am a health care provider and you have no right or entitlement to my labor.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

If this bill passes we'll see you in court, in the halls of Congress, and in state legislatures all across the country.  This will not stand.

Marco Rubio Addresses CPAC

Green Police

This was far and away my favorite Super Bowl ad. Funny!

Sharing Freedom

I just ran across the following post on Facebook.

2009 Haiti GDP = $7 Billion, 9 million people; 2009 Goldman Sachs bonus pool = $21 Billion, 30,000 people.

After rolling my eyes at this kind of rhetoric, I posted the following response.

Maybe you'd like to compare the freedom and liberty enjoyed by the citizens of this country to that of the Haitian people. It seems proportional to the wealth, doesn't it? Instead of ridiculing freedom and prosperity, let's share it.  http://anglicanaid.net/

Question: When are the academic snobs of the left going to realize that the enormous success of this country is directly tied to our freedom and liberty?

Answer: Never.  They don't like freedom and liberty.  They prefer condescension and control over those they consider 'less fortunate' than themselves.

Update: Never is a long time and people can change.

Validating My Obsession with 'final' and 'val'

Rich Hickey's keynote at this year's JVM Language Summit is brilliant.  If you're a programmer, then it's a must watch.  He presents a clear and relatively simple way to move forward in the ever-expanding sea of multi-core processors that we're all learning to program.

If you were to see any of the Java code I've written in recent years you'd undoubtedly notice my obsession with the final keyword.  The same holds true for 'val' in Scala.  It's well-known that immutability is a good thing when dealing with concurrency and for quite a while I've understood this simple concept in my gut.  Rich Hickey crystallizes the reasons for this gut instinct, defines the concepts of Value, Identity, State, and Time, and presents a way forward in the murky waters of parallel computing.

Go watch it.  Now.  Or as Rich might say, "perceive it."

NASA Launches Ares 1-X

Today NASA launched the Ares 1-X rocket to test concepts for planned missions to the Moon and Mars. As someone that grew up on the Space Coast watching my father's Atlas launches, it's exciting to see the space program moving forward.

Where are the JavaFX Devices?

I’m in the market for a new phone and I’d love to buy a JavaFX device.  Where (and when) are the phones?

My New Home

Hi all.  I'm moving to Squarespace.  It's a great hosting service that provides all the tools I need to maintain my web site so I can concentrate on my real job and have a real life.  It's a great service.