A post I wrote back in 2004 about the various problems that stem from our apparent desire to complexify everything.

I just finished the eBook of the 2nd edition of Atomic Scala. The PDF is, of course, the easiest since it gets created directly from Word (before you tell me I should use something other than Word — I have done numerous experiments, and Word still provides the most power of anything I’ve found that allows a single document to produce camera-ready publishable pages, and at the same time generates and maintains a table of contents and index).

Websockets change the shape of Internet development by allowing communication both ways — not only can the client send messages to the server, but with a websocket the server can at any time push information to the client (not just when the client decides to connect to the server). In effect this brings us back to the convenient world of desktop applications where the program and the user interface have two-way communication.

While there are a LOT of things I really like about the Go language, the bottom line is that I don’t use it (mostly because when I studied it the libraries were kind of scarce, something that’s apparently changed a lot). It attracted me, but not enough for me to change over from Python. Go has made some brilliant design decisions. I especially like the built-in features that in most other languages you must go figure out for yourself — like the build tool, standard formatting (enforced with go fmt) a test framework (which you run with go test), and natively-supported concurrency/parallelism.

Here is the video of the presentation I gave at Pycon 2013 on different ways of thinking about error handling, based on studying Scala and Go.

”) Photo courtesy JC Leacock Although the Java Posse has ended transmission, we are still having the conference, renamed to the Winter Tech Forum (yes, that’s WTF – because we’re always trying to figure things out). Come create conversation, generate ideas, hack projects, create workshops, ski, snowshoe, snowmobile and experience small-town living. The dates are Feb 23 - 27, 2015. Many people like to arrive earlier and stay a bit later; activities start with the Sunday evening barbecue and go through Saturday morning breakfast.