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I’ve just been watching the following talk over on InfoQ: Software Quality — You know it when you see it. Thanks to Craig over at SoftViz for pointing me to it. The talk is quite interesting, with the focus being primarily around using innovative visualizations of software to gauge quality. But, that’s not what . . . → Read More: Test to Code Ratio Recently, I’ve been working on improving the core framework that underpins the Whiley compiler. This provides a platform for reading/writing files of specified content in a structured fashion. Like Java, Whiley provides a hierarchical namespace in which names live and can be imported by others. Let’s consider a simple example: package zlib.core import Console . . . → Read More: A Problem of Decoupling? Well, it’s been almost two months in the making, but here’s the next release of Whiley. Quite of lot of changes, although there remain significant issues to resolve — particularly with the front-end. ChangeLog Fixed outstanding problem with list and set types related to type tests. More specifically, on the negative branch of a . . . → Read More: Whiley v0.3.13 Released! I’m always pondering the question: what makes good programming language syntax? One thing occuring to me is that many languages often ignore the HCI aspect. For me, it’s a given that the purpose of a programming language is to simplify the programmer’s life, not the other way around. So, I thought of a few . . . → Read More: Three Rules for Programming Language Syntax? As usual, it’s been a surprising amount of effort … but the next release of Whiley is available! It’s been quite a long time since the last update, but then quite a lot has improved. Unfortunately, I did find a fairly serious problem with my type system, which means I’ve got to go back . . . → Read More: Whiley v0.3.11 Released! The switch statement has a long history, and most languages support it or something similar. In my experience, I found it to be very useful — both for conciseness, and also improving performance. With the recent release of Java 7, you can finally switch over strings. In Whiley, the syntax for switch statements currently . . . → Read More: Fall-Through by Default for Switch Statements? Reverting is tough. There’s no doubt about it! I don’t mean tough as in technically challenging — no, version control systems make this easy! I mean tough as in mentally challenging. You’re faced with days or weeks of effort going down the drain, and you have to decide when to pull the plug. Sure, . . . → Read More: What Kind of Revert are You? With the upcoming v0.3.10 release of Whiley, the way import statements are interpreted has changed in a fairly significant manner. The primary purpose of this is to give better support for namespaces. The following illustrates what’s changed: import whiley.lang.Math bool check(int x, int y): return max(x,y) == x Previously, the above code would compile . . . → Read More: Namespaces in Whiley When designing a programming language, being on the lookout for ambiguous syntax is important. You don’t want to realise down the track that your syntax is ambiguous in some subtle way. This is especially true if it means the compiler can’t decide how to proceed on some important case(s). But, spotting these problems is . . . → Read More: Disambiguating Ambiguous Syntax? Some languages are complex, others are simple … right? C++ versus just about anything else is a good example here. But, it begs the question: what makes a language complex? So, I’ve just been reading Bruce Eckel’s Artima article on Scala. It’s actually a nice article, and I enjoyed it. But, one thing bugged . . . → Read More: Language Complexity? |
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