One of the goals of Scala is increased consistency compared to Java.Here are three high-level consistencies in Scala: Every value is an object. There are no primitives in Scala. Even its version of void (Unit) is an object. Nothing is an object. Nil is an object. Arrays are objects. Everything is an object. Every statement … Read moreConsistency in Scala
In Scala, the “for” structure can throw off the Java programmer. For one, it looks enough like a Java “for” loop for a Java programmer to make a guess on how it works — but that guess is likely to be wrong. For another, the for-loop is implemented in Scala as a special case of … Read moreFor-confusion in Scala
The topic of discussion at the office today (yes, it’s Sunday) is Languages, Verbosity, and Java by Dhanji R. Prasanna, which purports to extoll the clarity of Java compared to more expressive languages like Ruby, Python, and Scala. What it really says is: “Languages that are familiar are more readable.” Of course languages that are … Read moreFamiliarity v readability
The new version of IntelliJ IDEA is out, and I’m liking it. Gradle integration: creating a new project from a build.gradle was smooth and easy. Then when dependencies were added to the gradle file, the gradle plugin came in handy. One line added to build.gradle apply plugin: ‘idea’ and then one execution of gradle idea … Read moreIntelliJ IDEA 11
Today in Unit Testing, an evil framework class hid my important return value away in a private field. Groovy to the rescue! So far, all our code and tests are in Java. It took only two lines in build.gradle, as specified in the gradle documentation, and poof. I put my little test class in src/test/groovy/package/structure, … Read moreGradle is easy: Groovy tests
Want to apply just one commit from one branch into another branch? Don’t merge — that’ll bring in all the commits behind the one you want. The secret is: git cherry-pick To find the commit name, you can “git log “To see the contents of the commit, you can “git show “ Be in the … Read moreGit is hard: applying single commits to another branch
If you’re used to subversion and cvs, using git can be mind-bending. It does all the same things (and more), but nothing in quite the same way. Idiomatic git means creating local branches, doing lots of little commits, then altering your local commit history if needed before pushing to the shared repository. Today I tried … Read moreGit is hard: amending commit history
John Backus (pdf) distinguishes two parts of a programming language: “First, its framework which gives the overall rules of the system, and second, its changeable parts, whose existence is anticipated by the framework but whose particular behaviour is not specified by it.” The framework part is all the built-in language constructs. The changeable parts are … Read moreHumility in programming languages
In the previous post, we saw that each labeled block in a Gradle build file is really a closure with DELEGATE_FIRST scope. Each of these blocks has access to all the methods on the delegate object. The class of that delegate object varies by block. Even looking at the source code to identify the class … Read moreStupid Gradle Tricks #1: what can I do in this block?
Gradle, the build system, is a DSL on top of Groovy. The build scripts (which are really configuration scripts) are Groovy code. So why do they look so weird? Today I configured a particular obscure property of the eclipse plugin in milestone 6 of Gradle. The answer looks like: apply plugin: ‘eclipse-wtp’eclipse { wtp { … Read moreLifting the blankets of Gradle