Collection Libraries

The standard libraries of newer programming languages usually contain so called collection libraries. Collections can usually be Lists, Sets, Maps or specialization of these. They cover quite a lot and we start seeing variants that are built on immutability and variants that allow mutability and as always the hybrid in Ruby, that combines these and …

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Alpine Perl Workshop

On 2016-09-02 and 2016-09-03 I was able to visit the Alpine Perl Workshop. This was a Perl conference with around 50 participants, among them core members of the Perl community. We had mostly one track, so the documented information about the talks that were given is actually quite closely correlated to the list of talks …

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Error Messages in Web Applications

In Applications that are used by non-technical end users, which are these days very often web applications, we have to deal with the issue that an unexpected error occurs. There are the two extremes: We can just show a screen telling in a nice design that the application does not work and that is all. …

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Integers in Perl 6

The language Perl 6 has been announced to be production ready by the beginning of this year. Its implementation is Rakudo, while the Perl 6 programming language itself is an abstract language definition that allows any language implementation that passes the test suite to call itself an Perl 6 implementation. The idea is not totally …

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XML

In the late 1990es there was a real hype about XML. Tons of standards evolved and it was a big deal to acquire sound knowledge of it. It has been some success, because it is still around and very common almost 20 years later. I would say that the idea of having a human readable …

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Running a Large Number of Servers

These days we often have to run a large number of servers, and the times where we could afford to manually log into each one to do system administration tasks are mostly over. It turns out that there are always different approaches to deal with this. In most cases we are talking about virtual hosts, …

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Brass Music and what we can learn for IT

The English term „music“ refers to what we actually listen to, but also to how we write it down on paper, like this: This musical notation is actually like a programming language, because it allows to write down complex musical pieces on paper. But there is of course more to it than just mechanically playing …

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Some Thoughts about Incompleteness of Libraries

Selfwritten Util Libraries Today we have really good libraries with our programming languages and they cover a lot of things. The funny thing is, that we usually end up writing some Util-classes like StringUtil, CollectionUtil, NumberUtil etc. that cover some common tasks that are not found in the libraries that we use. Usually it is …

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Scala Days 2016

I have visited Scala Days in Berlin 2016-06-15 to 2016-06-17. A little remark on the format might be of interest. The conference is scheduled for 3 days. On the first day, there is only one speech, the first keynote, some time in the late afternoon. During Scala Days 2015 the rest of the day was …

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Linkedin will probably be bought by Microsoft

The social business online network LinkedIn will probably be bought by Microsoft for around 26’200’000’000 USD. Even if Microsoft has become a bit more trustworthy with Nadella then it was with Ballmer it remains an interesting question how much we should trust them concerning our data. The same issue arouse with Skype and other acquisitions …

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