Tag Archives: programming

internet, javascript, microsoft, professional, software development, Web, web authoring

Microsoft backs ECMAScript, dismisses Google Dart

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Microsoft has posted an article on Evolving ECMAScript on its IE Blog. ECMAScript is the official standard for what we call JavaScript. The company is proposing some minor additions “to address gaps in Math, String and Number functionality as well as Globalization.” It has also taken the opportunity to take a shot at Google, which is proposing a new web language called Dart:

Some examples, like Dart, portend that JavaScript has fundamental flaws and to support these scenarios requires a “clean break” from JavaScript in both syntax and runtime. We disagree with this point of view. We believe that with committee participant focus, the standards runtime can be expanded and the syntactic features necessary to support JavaScript at scale can be built upon the existing JavaScript standard.

Dart will compile to JavaScript so there is a measure of compatibility, but if the language catches on then browsers without a native implementation will be disadvantaged.

development, professional, software development, visual studio

What is the best programming language for a child progressing from Scratch?

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Someone asked me what is the best programming language for a child to learn after starting (and having success) with Scratch.

Scratch is a visual programming language which actually runs on Smalltalk, though its users do not need to know this. Scratch 2.0 seems to be written in Adobe Flash so you can create and program projects in a web browser. As far as I can tell though, there is no obvious and natural progression from Scratch to a code-centric programming language.

I guess the first answer is not to move away from Scratch until you need to. You can do a lot with Scratch, as the many shared projects demonstrate.

Still, I agree that it makes sense to learn text-based programming before too long. What is the best one for a child to learn, not necessarily with computer science or a professional career in mind, but just to take the next step and create some cool games and applications?

I find myself leaning towards Microsoft’s C#. The reason is that there is a capable free version and  you can add XNA Game Studio for game development. C# is an excellent language and has some family resemblance to other languages including C, C++, Java and JavaScript, and Visual Studio is a strong IDE that is perhaps more approachable than say Eclipse or Netbeans.

Snags with C# are that Visual Studio only runs on Windows, the language is proprietary to Microsoft (though Mono is free and open source) and it is not ideal if you want to run on the Mac, or Google Android or Apple iPad.

That said, I could also make a case for Java, or JavaScript, or Python.

I would value suggestions though: what would you recommend to a teenager?

.net, c++, intel, microsoft, open source, professional, software development

C++ 11 is approved by ISO: a big day for native code development

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Herb Sutter reports that C++ 0x, which will be called C++ 11, has been unanimously approved by the ISO C++ committee. The “11” in the name refers to the year of approval, 2011. The current standard is C++ 98, though amended as C++ 03, so it has taken 8 or 13 years to update it depending on how you count it.

This means that compiler makers can get on with implementing the full C++ 11 standard. Most current compilers implement some of the features already. This Apache wiki shows the current status. A quick glance suggests that the open source GCC is ahead of the pack, followed by Intel C++ and then perhaps Microsoft Visual C++.

C++ 11 is pretty much compatible with C++ 03 so existing code should still work. However there are many new features, enough for Bjarne Stroustrup to say in his feature summary:

Surprisingly, C++0x feels like a new language: The pieces just fit together better than they used to and I find a higher-level style of programming more natural than before and as efficient as ever. If you timidly approach C++ as just a better C or as an object-oriented language, you are going to miss the point. The abstractions are simply more flexible and affordable than before. Rely on the old mantra: If you think of it as a separate idea or object, represent it directly in the program; model real-world objects, and abstractions directly in code. It’s easier now.

Concurrent programming is better supported in C++ 11, important for getting the best performance from modern hardware.

It is curious how the programming landscape has changed in recent year. A few years back, you might have foreseen a day when most programming would be .NET, Java or JavaScript: all varieties of managed code. While those languages do still dominate, native code has come more to the fore, thanks to factors like Apple’s focus on Objective C, and signs of internal conflict at Microsoft over the best language for coding Windows applications.

That said, C++ 11 remains a demanding language to learn and use. As Stroustrup notes, since C++ 11 is a superset of C++ 98 it is technically harder to learn all of it, though new libraries and abstractions should help beginners. The reasons for using or not using C++ are not going to change significantly with this new standard.

ruby

Book Review: The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne

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“The plain fact of the matter is that Ruby has a number of pitfalls just waiting for unwary programmers to fall into,” says author Huw Collingbourne in his introduction to this guide to the Ruby language. He should know; he is co-founder and Technology Directory of SapphireSteel Software, which makes Ruby in Steel, an add-in for Visual Studio that enables Ruby development. He is also a technology journalist and writer of long standing, and specialist in explaining software development to a wide readership, and as you would expect this is a book with a clear and easy going style.

The Book of Ruby is a language guide. It takes you blow by blow through Ruby, starting at the beginning with strings, numbers, classes and objects. Despite Collingbourne’s background, there is little or nothing on tools, user interfaces, databases, or other development essentials; the focus is firmly on the language. There are plenty of short code examples but these are snippets to illustrate a point. There is a single chapter on Rails, the popular Ruby web development framework, but you have the sense that it is included because the author felt it had to be covered; it is the briefest of introductions and you will need another book if you want to know about Rails development.

A sharp focus on the language is a good thing, but it does make this a dry read, or possibly something you are more likely to dip into than to read end to end. You may find yourself thinking, “Remind me how Ruby does threading,” and read through chapter 17 on Threads to get a quick guide to threads, mutexes and fibers.

There are 20 chapters in all, with subjects including Arrays and Hashes, Loops and Iterators, Exception Handling, Blocks Procs and Lambdas, Modules and Mixins, YAML, Debugging and Testing, and Dynamic Programming.

Collingbourne knows his subject and if you are a software developer wanting to learn more about Ruby there is plenty of valuable material here.

That said, I have a couple of reservations.

First, I would have liked the author to tell us more about the why rather than the how of Ruby. Describing how a language works is all very well, but what are the things Ruby is particularly good for, and within Ruby, what are the techniques and features that make it a fantastic choice for certain kinds of development? What is the philosophy behind Ruby? I was expecting the author’s enthusiasm for Ruby to shine through, but it does not.

Second, the book is not long enough to be a comprehensive programming guide in the manner of David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto’s book The Ruby Programming Language (Matsumoto, or Matz, is the creator of Ruby). Nor is it suitable for a programming beginner, who is going to need more help with basic concepts than can be found here. In other words, it is not an advanced book, and it is only an introductory book in the context of someone who is already a seasoned developer, but not with Ruby. That is a narrow target.

On the other hand, I enjoyed the author’s pragmatism and direct, readable style. If you do fit the target readership, take a look; the Amazon links below include a complete list of contents and some sample pages.

 

software development

What’s the use of computing certifications?

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Not much, says ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist Martin Fowler. He should know, in that his company employs plenty of people with skills for which certification schemes exist in the computer industry, but he says that that certification fails a basic test. There is no correlation with competence.

For a certification to be useful, it needs a correlation with competence in the thing that it certifies. So if Alice has a certification in, say, clojure programming; then there should be a high probability that Alice is a competent clojure programmer. High probability isn’t a guarantee, but it should be significantly higher than the general programmer population. The reason we have disdain for most software certification programs is because we’ve not seen such a correlation (indeed sometimes we feel there’s a negative correlation).

He has a nice graphic to illustrate the point, and I encourage you to take a look.

It is a gloomy post:

At the moment the only way you can tell if someone is a good programmer is to find other good programmers to assess their ability. Such assessment is difficult, time-consuming, and needs to be repeated by each hiring organization. If you are a non-programmer looking to hire someone, such an assessment is particularly daunting.

Worse still, Fowler describes the micro-industry of certification schemes and the books, courses and assessments which support them as a form of corruption. That strikes me as harsh, though if they are as unfit for purpose as he suggests I see his point.

Personally I have never liked the fact that many assessments are based on multiple choice answers. There are several problems with these. One is that if there are four answers and you just have to pick the right one, you have a 25% chance of appearing competent by mere luck. In fact, sometimes one of the answers stands out as obviously wrong, giving you a 33% chance. Of course the scoring can take account of this; but I still dislike the approach, which is sometimes more about getting the answer the assessment expects than about getting the right answer.

It is my turn to be cynical, but I expect the ease of marking multiple choice papers, which can be completely automated online, is a factor. Having a human interpret a reasoned explanation for your choice would be more expensive but also more effective.

If you have many certifications to your name, there is no need to despair. Fowler just advises you not to show them off as a badge of competence.

It also has to be admitted that certifications do open doors and may well help you get that next post; not all employers take Fowler’s view.

Is he right? I would be interested in other opinions. If there are good ones, which are they? And if Fowler is even half-right, surely this industry is now sufficiently mature that it could devise certifications that actually do correlate with competence? It does not seem too much to ask, and would help employers to avoid costly mistakes.

.net, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, software development, Sun

What you are saying about the Java crisis

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A week or so ago I posted about the Java crisis and what it means for developers. The post attracted attention both here and later on The Guardian web site where it appeared as a technology blog. It was also picked up by Reddit prompting a discussion with over 500 posts.

So what are you saying? User LepoldVonRanke takes a pragmatic view:

I’d much rather have Java given a purpose and streamlined from a central authoritative body with a vision, than a community-run egg-laying, wool-growing, milk-giving super cow pig-sheep, that runs into ten directions at the same time, and therefore does not go anywhere. The Java ship needs a captain. Sun never got a good shot at it. There was always someone trying to wrestle control over Java away. With the Oracle bully as Uberfather, maybe Java has a place to go.

which echoes my suggestion that Java might technically be better of under more dictatorial control, unpalatable though that may be. User 9ren is sceptical:

Theoretically, the article is quite right that Java could advance faster under Oracle. It would be more proprietary, and of course more focussed on the kinds of business applications that bring in revenue for Oracle. It would be in Oracle’s interest; and the profit motive might even be a better spur than Sun had.

But – in practice – can they actual execute the engineering challenges?

Although Oracle has acquired many great software engineers (eg. from Sun, BEA Systems, many others), do they retain them? Does their organizational structure support them? And is Oracle known for attracting top engineering talent in general?

In its formation, Oracle had great software engineers (theirs was the very first commercial relational database, a feat many thought impossible). But that was 40 years ago, and now it’s a (very successful) sales-driven company.

There’s an important point from djhworld:

Java is hugely popular in the enterprise world, companies have invested millions and millions of pounds in the Java ecosystem and I don’t see that changing. Many companies still run Java 1.4.2 as their platform because it’s stable enough for them and would cost too much to upgrade.

The real business world goes at its own pace, whereas tech commentators tend to focus on the latest news and try to guess the future. It is a dangerous disconnect. Take no notice of us. Carry on coding.

On Reddit, some users focused on my assertion that the C# language was more advanced than Java. Is it? jeffcox111 comments:

I write in C# and Java professionally and I have to say I prefer C# hands down. Generics are very old news now in .Net. Take a look at type inference, lambdas, anonymous types, and most of all take a look at LINQ. These are all concepts that have been around for 3 years now in .Net and I hate living without them in Java. With .Net 5 on the horizon we are looking forward to better asynchronous calling/waiting and a bunch of other coolness. Java was good, but .Net is better these days.

and I liked this remark on LINQ:

I remember my first experience with LINQ after using C# for my final-year project (a visual web search engine). I asked a C# developer for some help on building a certain data structure and the guy sent me a pseudocode-looking stuff. I thanked him for the help and said that I’d look to find a way to code it and he said "WTF, I just gave you the code".

From there on I’ve never looked back.

Another discussion point is write once – run anywhere. Has it ever been real? Does it matter?

The company I work for has a large Java "shrinkwrap" app. It runs ok on Windows. It runs like shit on Mac, and it doesn’t run at all on Linux.

write once, run anywhere has always been a utopian pipe dream. And the consequence of this is that we now have yet another layer of crap that separates applications from the hardware.

says tonymt, though annannsi counters:

I’ve worked on a bunch of Java projects running on multiple unix based systems, windows and mac. GUI issues can be a pain to get correct, but its been fine in general. Non-GUI apps are basically there (its rare but I’ve hit bugs in the JVM specific to a particular platform)

Follow the links if you fancy more – I’ll leave the last word to A_Monkey:

I have a Java crisis every time I open eclipse.

.net, microsoft, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Book Reviews: Programming F# and Beginning F#

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I’ve been working with Microsoft’s new language F# recently and enjoying it. If it catches your interest, you might turn to a book in order to familiarise yourself with the basics. Here are two which I’ve looked at. They are both aimed at experienced developers who are new to F#.

Programming F# by Chris Smith

Programming F# comes from O’Reilly. It kicks off with Hello World and an introduction to the interactive console in Visual Studio 2010 – a great way to try out F#. Next we get a summary of types, and a brief explanation of how to write an F# program – stuff you have to know.

Chapter 3 is an introduction to functional programming, and also mentions type inference, an important F# feature. The following chapter explains mutable programming in F# – yes, you can do it; it is just not the default behaviour – and also covers exceptions. Chapter 5 turns to object-oriented programming in F#, another distinctive feature, while chapter 6 covers aspects specific to .NET such as garbage collection. That’s about half the book, and gets you up and running with the language.

The second half of the book is more interesting, looking at ways of using F#. Smith looks at applied functional programming, including pattern matching, recursion, continuations and closures. Next, there’s a look at applied object orientation. Chapter 9 covers scripting with F# – an interesting use case – and includes welcome examples for things like copying files and automating Microsoft Office. Chapter 10 is a key one, explaining computation expressions that let you create workflows and all-but extend the language. It’s “a very advanced concept that even expert developers can have a hard time grasping,” admits the author, though he presents it clearly.

Next we get a section on a likely reason for picking up F#: asynchronous and parallel programming. There’s a wide-ranging chapter explaining both .NET and F# asynchronous techniques, including the .NET Parallel Extensions. It’s a little confusing, especially since Smith observes that F# asynchronous workflows are sub-optimal for CPU parallelism; he recommends the .NET Parallel Extensions because of the better thread management it offers.

The last chapters cover .NET Reflection, code analysis and generation with Quotations – “deep wizardry”, says the author. An appendix summarises .NET Libraries and F# interop with COM and native code.

While this is an excellent language introduction, and thorough within the topics it covers, some aspects disappointed me. I cannot find any mention of F# agents, based on the MailboxProcessor class (nothing to do with email), which is a surprising omission; F# designer Don Syme sees it as a critical feature for scalable web development. Nor is there anything on graphics processing, another common usage, or any hint about how you might use F# for financial analysis. I also found it rather dry overall – hard to avoid with so much plumbing to cover, but I feel the author could have conveyed a little more excitement about what F# enables. Don’t make this the only F# book you read.

Beginning F# by Robert Pickering

This Apress title covers similar ground as the O’Reilly book, but with a slightly more hands-on and informal style, which on the whole I enjoyed. It starts with an introduction including a quote from Ralf Herbrich at Microsoft Research describing how he converted 1000 lines of C# into 100 lines of F# which performed just as well – this is the kind of real-world touch that makes you want to read on. The second chapter explains how to install F#, including different versions of Visual Studio, the open source SharpDevelop, and Mono on Linux – excellent diversity. Chapter 3 introduces functional programming, in effect a brisk overview of the core of F#. Read it slowly!

The author goes on to look at imperative programming and mutability in F#, and then object orientation, just as Smith did in his book. Chapter 6 is useful overview of how code is organised into modules and namespaces, and also covers comment annotations. Next, Pickering looks at F# libraries, including a brief look at math programming. Chapter 8 covers user interface coding – completely lacking in Smith’s book – complete with a quick look at GTK#, which works on Linux. There’s also a quick look at ASP.NET, Microsoft’s web server platform. Although this little introductions are too brief to be really useful, they do spark ideas about how you might use F#.

Data Access is next, another important real-world topic, covering XML, LINQ (Language Integrated Query) and ADO.NET.

Chapter 10 is when we get to parallel programming and reactive programming – code that waits for an external event before running. Pickering introduces F# agents and the MailboxProcessor class. Next comes a look at distributed applications using sockets, HTTP requests, web services, and Windows Communication Foundation.

Chapter 12 has the intriguing title Language-Oriented Programming, and should be taken together with the next chapter on parsing text. This is where we look at using data structures as little languages, parsing and interpreting text, and extending F# syntax. Finally, chapter 14 is the interop chapter, covering interop with C# as well as platform invocation for COM and native code.

Of the two books, this is the more lively and wide-ranging read, and more likely to enthuse you about the possibilities F# offers, though it skims the surface in places; many topics receive only shallow coverage.

View on Amazon.com

 

View on Amazon.co.uk

 

.net, microsoft, software, software development, visual studio

Anders Hejlsberg on functional programming, programming futures

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At TechDays in Belgium Micrososft’s C# designer and Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg spoke on trends in programming languages; you can watch the video here.

I recommend it highly, not so much because of any new or surprising content, but because in his low-key way Hejlsberg is a great communicator. The talk is mostly not about the far future, and much of what he covers relates directly to C# 4.0 and F# as found in Visual Studio 2010. Despite his personal investment in C#, Hejlsberg talks cheerfully about the benefits of F# and gives perhaps the best overview of functional programming I have heard, explaining what it is and why it is well suited to concurrency.

image

I will not try and summarise the whole talk here; but will bring out its unifying thought, which is that programming is moving towards a style that emphasises the “what” rather than the “how” of the tasks it encodes. This fits with a number of other ideas: greater abstraction, more declarative, more use of DSLs (domain-specific languages).

The example he gives early on describes how to get a count of groups in a set of data. You can do this using a somewhat manual approach, iterating through the data, identifying the groups, storing them somewhere, and incrementing the count as items belonging to each group are discovered.

Alternatively you can code it in one shot using the count keyword in LINQ or SQL (though Hejlsberg talked about LINQ). This is an example of using a DSL (Domain Specific Language), and also demonstrates a “what” rather than “how” approach to code. It is easier for another programmer to see your intention, as there is no need to analyse a set of loops and variables to discover what they do.

There is another reason to prefer this approach. Since the implementation is not specified, the compiler can more easily optimise your code; you do not care provided the result is correct. This becomes hugely important when it comes to concurrency, where we want the compiler or runtime to utilise many CPU cores if they are available. He has a screenshot of Task Manager running on a 128-core machine which apparently exists in Redmond (I can’t quite read the figure for total RAM but think it may be 128GB):

image

Hejlsberg says there was a language doldrums between 1995 and 2005, when many assumed that Java was the be-all and end-all. I wonder if this is a tacit admission that C#, which he was working on during that period, is not that different in philosophy from Java? The doldrums are over and we now have an explosion of new and revived languages: Ruby, Groovy, Python, Clojure, Boo, Erlang, F#, PowerShell and more. However, Hejlsberg says it makes sense for these to run on an existing framework – in practice either the Java or .NET runtime – since the benefits are so great.

Hejsberg also predicts that distinctions such as dynamic versus static languages will disappear as each language absorbs the best features from other languages. “Traditional taxonomies of languages are breaking down as languages pick paradigms from each other,” he says. The new language paradigm is multi-paradigm.

Just as C# has now acquired dynamic features, we can expect it to get better support for immutability in future (borrowed from functional languages).

microsoft, software development, sql, web authoring

Functional programming, NOSQL themes at QCon London

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One reason I enjoy the QCon London software development conference is that it reflects programming trends. Organiser Floyd Marinescu described it as by practitioners for practitioners. In previous years I’ve seen themes like disillusionment with enterprise Java, the rise of Agile methodologies, the trend towards dynamic languages, and the benefits of REST.

So what’s hot this year? A couple of trends are striking. One is functional programming. Don Syme, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and co-inventor of F#, gave a lively presentation on functional approaches to parallelism and concurrency. He shows screen after screen of equivalent F# and C# code, illustrating how F# is more concise and expressive, as well as being better suited to concurrent development.

F# is one of the languages included by default in Visual Studio 2010, which should be released shortly.

I asked Syme what sort of problems are not well suited to F#. In his reply he described the state of play in Visual Studio 2010, where you can easily create F# libraries but there is no designer support for user interface code, such as Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation. That is merely a tooling issue though.

Syme’s point is that functional programming, and F# in particular, is ideal for today’s programming challenges, including concurrency and asynchronous code.

If nothing else, he convinced me that every .NET programmer should at least be looking at F# and learning what it can do.

The functional programming track at QCon is not just about F#, of course, though in some ways it seems to be the functional language of the moment.

The other theme that has made a big impression is NoSQL, or what the QCon track calls “Non-relational database managers and web-oriented data”.Geir Magnusson from Gilt Groupe talked about the challenge of running a web site which has extreme peaks in traffic, and where every user needs dynamic data and transaction support so simple caching does not work. They were unable to get their relational database store to scale to handle thousands of transactions a second. They solved the problem with an in-memory non-relational database.

In another talk, the BBC discussed their use of CouchDB for highly scalable web sites.

javascript, microsoft, software development, Uncategorized

Why programmers should study Microsoft’s random failure and not trust Google search

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The bizarre story of the EU-mandated Windows browser choice screen took an unexpected twist recently when it was noticed that the order of the browsers was not truly random.

image

IBM’s Rob Weir was not the first to spot the problem, but did a great job in writing it up, both when initially observed and after it was fixed by Microsoft.

It was an algorithm error, a piece of code that did not return the results the programmer intended.

Unless Microsoft chooses to tell us, there is no way to tell how the error happened. However, as Weir and others observe, it may be significant that a Google search for something like Javascript random sort immediately gets you sample code that has the same error. Further, the error is not immediately obvious, making it particularly dangerous.

I am sure I am not the only person to turn to Google when confronted with some programming task that requires some research. In general, it is a great resource; and Google’s own algorithms help a little with filtering the results so that sites with better reputation or more inbound links come higher in the results.

Still, what this case illustrates – though accepting again that we do not know how the error occurred in this instance – is that pasting code from a Google search into your project without fully understanding and testing it does not always work. Subtle bugs like this one, which may go unnoticed for a long time, can have severe consequences. Randomisation is used in security code, for example.

As an aside, there also seems to be some randomness in the appearance of the browser choice screen. It turned up on my laptop, but not on my desktop, although both have IE as the default.

And who would have guessed that the EU would arrange for so many of us to get an ad for something like the GreenBrowser popping up on our desktop? Apparently it is the “best choice of flexible and powerful green web browser”, though since it is based on IE it is less radical a choice than it first seems.

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