Ramblings of a coder

I'm a Java guy - I've dabbled around in other languages but generally speaking my default language of choice for a project comes back to Java. It's been that way for a while, and quite honestly it's because out of the languages that I've looked at it seems the best "general" one out there. It's extremely versatile, can do an awful lot in the right hands and despite the various myths, well written Java code is really rather speedy these days. More recently though, there's been a lot of talk about Scala - it's been around for a decade or so but it seems it's only recently it's gained a lot of attention. Every so often something comes along that looks great from an academic perspective, but for various reasons (usually because the industry has made its mind up already) it's not adopted - left to rot and subsequently forgotten about. Then again, every so often something comes along that looks awful from an academic perspective but someh...

I like coming up with these things once in a while. They exercise the mind, make people think and occasionally someone comes up with another method or two of solving the thing I hadn't considered. So, here we go. You've been presented with the following class written by your boss, which is meant to print "goodbye" out to the console. However, as you can clearly see the following code actually prints "hello". Your boss has asked you to rectify this problem somehow, but his code is perfect and it must be a bug in the JDK (of course). In fact, he's already compiled the thing and it's ready to go, so he's said the only thing you're allowed to do is to add / modify / change class files in the bosscode package before it's released. Change whatever classes you want, as long as it's not Main.class (that's the perfect one!) package bosscode; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { new java.lang.Runnable() ...

It'd all gone pretty quiet on the Java 7 front recently - the last that'd been heard for a while was an estimate of a late 2010 release. I was hoping no news was good news on this front and that sometime around Christmas we might hear something positive regarding a release - alas this isn't the case. This link sheds some light on things: http://blogs.sun.com/mr/entry/rethinking_jdk7 To summarise, it seems now that JDK7 is going to have an estimated ship date of mid 2011, *but* with a lot of the new features everyone was raving about (including Lambda, Jigsaw and parts of Coin) pushed back to JDK8 which should hit home in around 2 years time. The other approach detailed is shipping JDK7 with all its original bits in mid 2012 with no updates in the meantime. Everyone was hoping for something a bit quicker, yes, but I guess with the Sun / Oracle acquisition slowing things down Java was bound to take a bit of a back seat. It's not such bad news, and if anything I'm mil...

After a bit of thought I decided I could no longer justify shelling out for a domain and hosting package on mikkle.co.uk for what had essentially become low traffic blog. So here it is - the site in its new format on blogger. Unfortunately I can't upload files here, but I'll set up a Google site for that and link out to them on there. Apart from those changes things should pretty much stay as usual - same guy, same thoughts!