The fact is that there are a lot of problems that are hard to solve in a purely-functional style. That’s not to say that no solution exists, but certain problems are very difficult to model without shared state. In such situations, a slightly different approach to concurrency must be considered. Actors are inapplicable, seeing as [...]
More and more projects (especially startups) have been choosing to build their software in multiple languages. Rather than using SQL for the database, XML for the RPC and Java for the everything else, companies have learned that sometimes a different language can serve best in a specific area. Ola Bini provides some guidance with regards [...]
I think we can all agree that concurrency is a problem. Not really a problem as in “lets get rid of it”, but more the type of problem that really smart people spend their entire lives trying to solve. Over the years, many different solutions have been proposed, some of them low-level, some more abstract. [...]
One of the most surprising things I’ve ever read about Scala came in the form of a (mostly positive) review article. This article went to some lengths comparing Scala to Java, JRuby on Groovy, discussing many of its advantages and disadvantages relative to those languages. Everyone seems to be writing articles to this effect these [...]
In my previous post, I introduced the concept of "persistent vectors" and walked through one implementation of the idea. When I actually pushed the post out, I was pretty happy with my code, but it seems I still have much to learn. A number of very smart people replied, suggesting ways that the [...]