Functional programming is another programming paradigm that is popular, mostly in academics. The best example of a functional programming language is Haskell and Standard ML. The fundamental difference between functional programming and object oriented programming is that you are programming in the sense of data flow instead of control flow. See the presentation Taming Effects … Read more
Asynchronous Asynchronous literally means not synchronous. Email is asynchronous. You send a mail, you don’t expect to get a response NOW. But it is not non-blocking. Essentially what it means is an architecture where “components” send messages to each other without expecting a response immediately. HTTP requests are synchronous. Send a request and get a … Read more
I would also recommend ASM, but have a look at Jasmin, I used it (or, rather, had to use it) for a university project, and it worked quite well. I wrote a lexer-parser-analyzer-optimizer-generator combination for a programing language using Java and Jasmin, so it was generating JVM Code. I uploaded the code here; the interesting … Read more
There’s the null-safe dereferencing operator (?.) in Groovy… I think that’s what you’re after. (It’s also called the safe navigation operator.) For example: homePostcode = person?.homeAddress?.postcode This will give null if person, person.homeAddress or person.homeAddress.postcode is null. (This is now available in C# 6.0 but not in earlier versions)
Very interesting questions! I tend to limit my config files to a very simple “key=value” format, because I fully agree with you that config files can very quickly become full-blown programs. For example, anyone who has ever tried to “configure” OpenSER knows the feeling you are talking about: it’s not configuration, it’s (painful) programming. When … Read more
Computer software, and sometimes also other computing-related systems like computer hardware or algorithms, is called Vanilla when not customized from its original form, meaning that it is used without any customizations or updates applied to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_software
I learned from Kip Irvine’s book. If you ignore the (fair) criticisms of his (irrelevant) libraries, I can recommend it as a good introduction to the language itself — although for the really interesting stuff you have to hunt out obsessives on the net. I think it’s useful to understand what happens at the lower … Read more
Simple. When I use it, it’s a modern dynamic language, when you use it, it’s merely a scripting language!
Here’s a meatspace example: Automobiles have abstractions for drivers. In its purest form, there’s a steering wheel, accelerator and brake. This abstraction hides a lot of detail about what’s under the hood: engine, cams, timing belt, spark plugs, radiator, etc. The neat thing about this abstraction is that we can replace parts of the implementation … Read more
Yes, it’s very possible, although a standard HM-style type system is usually the wrong choice for most idiomatic Lisp/Scheme code. See Typed Racket for a recent language that is a “Full Lisp” (more like Scheme, actually) with static typing.