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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Operator Overloading

When Java was created, the concept of operator overloading was already present in C++. I would say that it was generally well done in C++, but it kind of breaks the object oriented polymorphism patterns of C++ and the usual way was to have several overloaded functions to allow for all n² combinations. In the …

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Usability „Pearl“

I just found this usability pearl: After entering a credit card number as usual with spaces between the groups of four digits, the web page complained like this: Yes, it is easy to allow spaces. Just match the following regex /^\s*\d{4}\s*\d{4}\s*\d{4}\s*\d{4}\s*$/ and then remove the spaces when processing it, but do not let the user …

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Virtual machines

We all know that Java uses a „virtual machine“ that is it simulates a non-existing hardware which is the same independent of the real hardware, thus helping to achieve the well known platform independence of Java. Btw. this is not about virtualization like VMWare, VirtualBox, Qemu, Xen, Docker and similar tools, but about byte code …

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Primitives, Objects and Autoboxing

The type system in Java makes a difference between so called „primitives“, which are boolean, byte, char, int, long, float and double and Objects, which are anything derived from Object in object oriented philosophy, including the special case of arrays, which I will not discuss today. Primitive types have many operations that are kind of …

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Numeric types in Perl

Dealing with numeric types in Perl is not as strait-forward as in other programming languages. We can use „scalars“ out of the box, but then we get floating point numbers, more precisely what is called „double“ in most programming languages. This is kind of ok for trivial programs, but we should make a deliberate choice …

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Perl 6

Perl 6 has silently reached its first production ready release on Christmas 2015, called v6c. It will be interesting to explore what this language can do, which features it offers and how it compares to existing relevant and interesting languages like Java, C, Ruby, Perl (5), Clojure, Scala, F#, C++, Python, PHP and others in …

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UTF-16 Strings in Java

Deutsch Strings in Java and many other JVM-languages consist of Unicode content and are encoded as utf-16. It was fantastic to already consider Unicode when introducing Java in the 90es and to make it the only reasonable way to use strings, so there is no temptation to start with a „US-ASCII“-version of a software that …

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Scanning, sorting and processing large numbers of photos

I guess for most of us this is more an issue of their private life rather than done professionally, and those woo do this for money should already have answers for everything…. But the IT aspects of this are interesting anyway… So some of us, including me, have hundreds or thousands of photographs that have …

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