With type inference you avoid “finger-typing” on both sides of an assignment:

Foo myFoo = new Foo()
var myFoo = new Foo() //Type-inference (no "win" here, but with parameterized types...)

Type inference also works with functions, allowing you to write:

def bar() : Foo = { ...etc... }
def bat(foo : Foo) = { ...etc... }

var myFoo …

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Definitely a step up from "A Feast for Crows" (my review: "What a slog...") in that it is primarily told from the viewpoint of major characters, but the plot is still disturbingly bogged down: after …

Kraken by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most successful "modern gods and magic" book I've read (although actually I experienced it as an audiobook). This is the quality that I thought "American Gods" was going to achieve (when in fact I thought that book was …

On July 3, 1988, I moved to San Francisco from San Diego (more specifically, I moved to Sausalito from Pacific Beach) to take a job as Product Review Editor on Computer Language and AI Expert magazines. I remember riding the Marin Airporter (for the first, but certainly not last, time …

Still struggling with the benefits of the Reader monad… In the well-liked answer on StackOverflow, mergeconflict says

I can explain how Reader works easily: it’s a function, and it takes an argument.

OK, so I think the structure of the technique seems clear: instead of being dependent on …

Redshirts by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What starts as a piss-take on "Star Trek"s disposable away-team characters gets, first, properly twisted (the characters put the pieces together) and then goes meta, or recursive, or something. Funny and breezily written, with some appropriately sentimental genre stuff …

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A slog through 1000 pages of genealogies and minor characters failing in their plots. Isn't THE WHOLE DAMN POINT that all this bickering about the Iron Throne is pointless while the true threats are creeping …

One of the major quos one gets pro being on a 2-year contract quid is that it’s not disloyal, 6-months out, to publicly seek a new opportunity.

Supposedly, the software development community has weathered the Great Recession well and has come roaring back. To believe my Twitter feed, everyone …

Ah.

It turns out that it’s a terrible mistake to leave the “Autoimport” feature of Photostream on in iPhoto or Aperture when you go on vacation. If you leave it on, and you do the logical thing of moving your daily photographs into your laptop, when you merge the …

I have this very mundane need: an application to fill the SD card that goes into a digital picture frame. You know, don't show photos that were on it last time, show all the photos that are new since last time, show higher-rated photos more than lower-rated ones, etc.

I …