The Cafes » 2006 » May

All the hoohaw over finality, its goodness or badness, and whether or not it should be the default, suggests it’s worth exploring the background. Why do I feel so strongly that final should be the default (at least for methods) and what changes could be made to modify this belief?
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The final chapter of the recently published Java I/O, 2nd edition focuses on the Java Bluetooth API. Like about half of what’s going on in Java today the Java Bluetooth API was defined and developed in the Java Community Process (JCP). I spend a lot of energy criticizing the W3C process, but compared to the JCP, it’s a model of sanity.
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Here’s an interesting article that is totally, completely 180 degrees wrong. I’ve said this before, and I’ve said it again, but I’ll say it one more time: final should be the default. Java’s mistake was not that it allowed classes to be final. It was making final a keyword you had to explicitly request rather than making finality the default and adding a subclassable keyword to change the default for those few classes that genuinely need to be nonfinal. The lack of finality has created a huge, brittle, dangerously breakable infrastructure in the world of Java class libraries.

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One of my flaws as a writer is that I say too much. I find it really hard to cut out as much as I need to. Sometimes I come up with a good turn of phrase, and I just can’t let it go. However sometimes I need to. It’s not that the sentence or paragraph itself is wrong or bad in any way. It’s just that it no longer fits into the whole fabric of the article or book. Sometimes the article or book simply needs to be shorter. Even if every single sentence is well-written and conveys valuable information, sometimes the interest of the audience dictates that you say less rather than more. It’s a rare author who can keep an audience’s interest on the Web for more than a couple of thousand words, and I’m not one of them. Sometimes you have to cut just to keep the size down.

Software development is much the same. (more…)

Hi there. My name’s Rusty, and I’m an air conditioning tech. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I know how to wield an electronic screwdriver and recharge the freon in a unit. Lately I’ve taken a job with Roy’s Environmental Systems Technology. It sounds impressive, but really it’s just another air conditioning and heating company, nothing cutting edge, nothing fancy. We mostly just call it REST.
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