Lang.NET Conference: Seattle, Here I Come!

Microsoft is hosting the The .NET Programming Languages And Compilers Symposium in August. 10 minute lightning talks on type systems, domain-specific languages, and code generation? Oh, you know I'm going.

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Continuations in Mono: Good News for Language Implementors

According to Miguel de Icaza, Mono, the cross-platform implementation of the .NET CLR, now has continuations thanks to the work of Tomi Valkeinen. The work is here. Continuations are significant to a number of programming languages that have been hard to implement on the CLR. Valkeinen's work may help a …

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Games on Rails

So, I have the opportunity to help design a game SDK. On the one hand, I can go "sprites, sounds, physics," etc. And on the other hand, I can say Ruby on Rails. Which is to say, I can look to RoR as an inspiration of a very successful framework …

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Virtual methods are thread unsafe

In my February 15th SD Times column on the future of concurrent programming models, I wrote "[A] basic rule for thread safety is 'either write objects with no fields or write objects with no virtual method calls'...." I received an email today from someone asking about why virtual method calls …

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Sudoku source code available on MSDN

::: {.Section1}

Source code for Sudoku game like that in the Microsoft Touch Pack for UMPCs has been released on MSDN. "This article closely examines Stephen Toub's Tablet PC-based implementation of Sudoku. It is the same implementation in the Touch Pack, a software package that comes preinstalled on ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs …
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Breast cancer and taxes

Instead of blogging about what's really going on in my life, I'll just say that I'm always surprised at the amount of whining I hear from computer professionals about doing taxes. Not whining about taxes, which is more than understandable, especially for the self-employed, but whining about doing taxes. Doing …

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Functional vs. OOP

::: {.Section1} Something I’ve been finding myself doing:

[class Foo{]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  int someState;]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[ ]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  static int Bar(int state)]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  {]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[    return state * state;]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  }]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[ ]{style="font-family …

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"Meltdown expected"? Fetch me my cattle prod!

A cab rider was detained for singing along to the Clash song "London Calling." Geez, lucky he wasn't singing "Guns of Brixton"

Gawd. I am so happy I'm not a teenager today. Given the bands I liked, I'd probably be in Guantanamo by now. I know that some of the …

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Crossing the Chasm: Programming Languages Edition

::: {.Section1} [Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is the best explanatory text of why tools succeed in the software development world (its scope is broader than SD, but SD is smack in the middle of its explanatory power). The basic idea is that dividing the world into a bell curve of …

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