The Cafes » Programming

The call for papers for Software Development 2008 West is now live. What follows are abstracts for some talks that I am not giving, but that I very much hope someone else will present. If anyone feels like submitting one of these under their own name, I’ll champion it when the advisory board goes over the submissions.

Intro to Ruby

Ruby is the fastest growing programming language of the new millennium. Through interactive exercises, this full day, hands on tutorial will bring programmers from zero to sixty with the language including:

• Control structures
• Strings and Regular Expressions
• Formatted Output
• Arrays and Hashes
• Math
• Objects and classes
• Closures
• Files
• Network Programming

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Perhaps the continuing confusion over the difference between checked and runtime exceptions in Java is because we haven’t named them properly. Mosts texts and teachers, including myself, have traditionally focused on how and when you handle the exceptions (compile time or runtime) rather than on what causes each. I propose a modification, not in code, but in terminology and teaching. Specifically I think we should should start calling checked exceptions “external exceptions” and runtime exceptions “internal exceptions”.
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It’s hard to believe that more than a decade after Java was released, there are still so many tasks it can’t do. I’m not just talking about things it can’t do well, but about things that you just can’t do without shelling out to native code. Here is a list of tasks that still need native code:
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Steve Yegge tantalizes us with a post on the next big language, but he won’t say what it is. A lot of people think he’s talking about JavaScript, but I’m betting he’s writing about Groovy.
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The gates seem to be open for serious revisions to the Java language in Java 7. Thus it’s worth reviewing why some things are just flat out bad ideas for any language, because too many developers either never knew this or have forgotten it. First up: operator overloading:
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