Programming Everything!

As PHP is not a strictly OOP language, it is very easy to slip into sloppier and more procedural code as well as program in PHP one's entire career and not deal with OOP at all. In this tutorial, I will cover the following: Why use OOP over procedural programming, as I have been doing?Encapsulation and modularityBasic class design

First, right off the top here: Scala has true blue Java-like null; any reference may be null. Its presence muddies the water quite a bit. But since Beust's article explicitly talks about Haskell he's clearly not talking about that aspect of Scala because Haskell doesn't have null. I'll get back to Scala's null at the end but for now pretend it doesn't exist.Second, just to set the record straight: "Option" has roots in programming languages as far back as ML. Both Haskell's "Maybe" and Scala's "Option" (and F#'s "Option" and others) trace their ancestry to it.

The R programming language was featured about a year ago in a New York Times article (http://bit.ly/iaqQ). I've been an R user since 2000, so I've collected some resources for people who want to get started with R.   The first place to start is the R Project web site at http://www.r-project.org/. Next, you'll actually want to install R itself. There are several options, depending on your environment.

The latest episode of the Robots Podcast looks at the following scenario: Imagine being able to throw a hand-full of smart matter in a tank full of liquid and then pulling out a ready-to-use wrench once the matter has assembled. This is the vision of this episode's guests Michael Tolley and Jonas Neubert from the Computational Synthesis Laboratory run by Hod Lipson at Cornell University, NY. Tolley and Neubert give an introduction into Programmable Matter and then present their research on stochastic assembly of matter in fluid, including both simulation (see video above) and real-world implementation. Read on or tune in!

I happened to write this code sometime back that took Excel data and converted it to specific xml format. It was a simple Linq statement and here is the code

With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.  

As many long time readers know, I am an enthusiast of the F# programming language.  I make no apologies for the fact that, if you are developing software on the .NET platform, F# is one of the better choices you can make for numerous reasons.  It is one of the reasons I proudly contributed as a co-author to the book, Professional F# 2.0, which is being published by Wrox in October. Some of the oft cited benefits of F# are that, to distill them quickly, it is good at doing intensely mathematical operations, it is built for parallelism, and it is good at helping define domain specific languages.  Those benefits are so often cited by speakers on the F# speaker circuit that they pretty much seem cliche to me at this point (note, yours truly is proud to call himself a member of said circuit, and often gives this talk!)  As great as these features are, there are a couple features, that in my more mundane F# experiences, seem to stand out as things that “save my ass”, for lack of a better phrase, more often than not.

When a data (typically a variable) can be accessed by several threads, you must synchronize the access to the data to ensure visibility and correctness.

If you need a quick reference guide for the UML notation, check one of the following, IMHO, gret UML cheat sheets (in no particular order):

Just finishing off the chapter on bit syntax and pattern matching over bit strings for our Erlang book. We wanted to put in a realistic example, and chose a TCP segment as described  here. It's amazing how expressive the notation can be, and we get a definition which pretty much mirrors the diagram and explanation in the link above: nothing like doing it for yourself to convince you that it works.

In this interview Spotty Bowles, a tester on the VB Compiler team, shows us a couple of new language features: Array and Collection Initializers. He gives us insight into how they are implemented in the compiler and best practices on how to use them in our code. Additionally, he discusses how to extend Collection Initializers with your own extension methods.

There's much excitement about JDK 7 and in particular Lambdas! I've waded through the bloat to help you get an understanding of it. If you search for JDK 7 in your favourite search engine the chances are you'll hit the controversies surrounding lambadas in Java fairly early on in your hunt. It's a contentious subject, which means it's getting a lot of attention from a lot of clever people, but this in turn makes the process slow and adds difficulty in making decisions. My take is that lambdas will be in JDK 7 - you can see plenty of evidence of that around the web and in the snapshot builds. That said, no decision is concrete (which is a wise tip from The Pragmatic Programmer no less!). This article is aimed at those who don't know much about functional programming or what Lambdas, Closures or Currying are and want to get 'primed'.

As promised in the previous post, let’s continue with Grails support in  IntelliJ IDEA 8. Today we’ll see how the powerful IntelliJ IDEA‘s code completion applies to the Grails applications.

In mathematics, computer science, and related subjects, an 'algorithm' is an effective method for solving a problem expressed as a finite sequence of instructions. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and many other fields. (In more advanced or abstract settings, the instructions do not necessarily constitute a finite sequence, or even a sequence; see, for example, "nondeterministic algorithm".) Each algorithm is a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task. Starting from an initial state, the instructions describe a computation that proceeds through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate randomness. [source = Bing Reference]

In this demo we showcase efforts in MSR to collaborate with external researchers to explore the application of new technologies, specifically Dryad and DryadLINQ, to big data research problems in science. We also highlight our efforts to provide software and services to academics across the world, through the release of Dryad and DryadLINQ free of charge to the research community, along with associated programming guides, user documentation, and code libraries. Dryad is a general-purpose distributed computing engine, more flexible than MapReduce or Hadoop!, that was designed to simplify the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of Windows computers. DryadLINQ is an abstraction layer which simplifies the process of implementing Dryad-based applications. Microsoft Research is acutely aware of the ubiquity of big data and the challenges this presents. We are offering researchers the tools, resources and collaboration to explore this new area.

Sencha , formerly known as "Ext JS", has announced the beta release of Sencha Touch, an HTML5-based mobile application framework. Sencha Touch gives mobile application developers access to HTML5 technologies that can be deployed to both Apple and Android devices, while giving users applications that look and feels like native applications, with no need to download application updates. "HTML5 technologies are here, they're being adopted very quickly, and by the end of the year they'll be running on every mobile device that matters," said Sencha's Abe Elias. "As server and client frameworks continue to fragment, the mobile device industry has consolidated on the HTML5-capable Webkit browser as its default platform."

In Stack Machines, Expression Evaluation, and the Magic of Reverse Polish, I showed how expressions can be evaluated by rewriting them in reverse Polish and translating this into machine-code instructions for a stack machine. I demonstrated with a stack-machine interpreter that I'd written as part of a working model of a Pascal compiler. But as well as expressions, the compiler needs to compile assignments and jumps, so — in my progress towards explaining the compiler — I'm going to extend the machine code so it can handle these. I'll demonstrate by interpreting a program that calculates five factorial.

Complex computer models can involve thousands of variables. But paradoxically, adding more variables can sometimes make them easier to work with.

On June 23, the new Xtext version 1.0 will be released as part of Eclipse's annual release train. During the last year Xtext has grown from a tiny DSL editor generator, to a full-blown language development framework. With Xtext 1.0 you can develop complex programming languages and you not only get an advanced editor, but a complete integrated development environment (IDE) based on Eclipse. The new workspace indexer and the builder infrastructure enable sophisticated IDE features, as we will demonstrate in this webinar. The new JVM-types allow you to link to and integrate with any Java element and Eclipse's JDT. During the webinar we will give a short overview on Xtext and how it works behind the scenes. We will demo different aspects of the framework’s features and show how to implement an interpreter for arithmetic expressions. The 60 minutes will be a great opportunity for you to get in touch with the Xtext core committers, ask questions and learn about the new and noteworthy features in version 1.0.

In short, Joe argues, "Throughout, it became abundantly clear that TM, much like generics, was a systemic and platform-wide technology shift. It didn’t require type theory, but the road ahead sure wasn’t going to be easy." The whole blog post deals with how many implementation challenges platform-wide support for STM would be in .NET, including what options were considered. He does not mention Maurice Herlihy's SXM library approach, but refers to Tim Harris's work several times.