It is a challenge to find definitions for computer science terms, which are understandable, correct and uncontentious. Lately I have needed to come up with a good definition of type.

How many of these myths apply in your organization?

Here's a humorous look at the the evolution of a programmer.

An interesting (old) post in Artima's Java Buzz titled "Are Weblogs an Incarnation of Lifestreams?" by Hugo Pinto asks if Weblogs are the first widely-adopted incarnation of LifeStreams? As it happens I'm finishing up a historical piece on Lifestreams that is going to be published by MIT Press and I've been asking myself that very question.

Keep close tabs on your server with voice output.

It is commonly assumed that in order to achieve some measure of run-time polymorphism we have to state in a class declaration that it it either implements an interface or it inherits from a base class with virtual functions. Not anymore ...

Passing null into methods is considered bad practice, but sometimes it can be very powerful.

I have made a first public release of the C++ Object Oriented Template Library ( OOTL ). An open-source library with the rather ambitious goals of providing object-oriented alternatives to the C++ primitives and the STL collections.

The JavaPolis 2004 conference takes place in Antwerp, Belgium, the week of the 13th to the 17th of December. An excellent selection of speakers (plus your humble scribe) at a very affordable price.

So Microsoft has applied for a new patent on the IS NOT operator in Visual Basic. I hope it is accepted, so I can openly and flagrantly violate the patent in my language, Heron.

Programming really is all about the languages that we create and use. Unfortunately, not in the way that most people think.

Exceptions are not errors. The distinction is more subtle than most programmers realize.

There are many different "[insert-buzzword-here] Driven Design" methodologies, i.e. Policy Driven Design, UI Driven Design, Data Driven Design. I would like to propose a new one: "Implementation Driven Design".

I have been looking mock objects and test driven design lately. The main issue, I see brought up over and over again is that people want to modify existing code by inserting mock objects, but that it is hard to do because of code dependencies. I argue that proper use of abstraction at the implementation level would make it much easier.

My previous blog entry on the bank account class, sparked some lively and interesting discussion. It also revealed two very distinct approach to object oriented programming, which I label the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach.