Here’s a place where Scala does some clever stuff which ultimately might produce a more complicated programming model than one would like. I discovered it while sorting out some issues with the first exercise in the References & Mutability atom in Atomic Scala. I’ll give you the examples directly out of the solution guide — this includes the use of our tiny AtomicScala test framework, but if you don’t want to include that you can just comment out the import and all the is statements and you’ll still get the same results.

During my October trip to Europe to speak at Geecon Prague (see here, here and here), I traveled to Scotland to visit friends Jason and Brooke (just to my right in the photograph) and to see the place. While I was there Jason asked me to speak to the brand-new computer club that he was helping with, at the Aberdeen International School where they both teach. The club had decided to use Python as their learning language, so of course I was enthusiastic.

I really enjoy solving problems quickly and thoroughly. I especially enjoy solving annoying, repetitive problems that invite human error. The icing on the cake is when I learn some new tricks in the process. This last few days was a flurry of problem-solving and trick-learning. My favorite tricks are small bits of learning that make code easier to write, read and use. A couple of these are Windows-specific but most are general.

I’ve wanted to move this programming blog away from Artima for what seems like several years now (Here’s an earlier update on the process). My buddy Bill hasn’t found developing the blogging platform to be of much interest anymore, and in particular he realizes there are many better alternatives at this point. The conversion took a surprising amount of research, partly because I’ve been away from blogging technology for quite awhile.

(This post is an experiment to test a new blogging platform. This version is just straight out of MarkdownPad into Github pages, with no other software on my local machine) Balancing Uncertainty via Concrete Projects The Reinventing Business project is my “own personal Everest to climb,” my project that, once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee. It’s also very unclear whether I will ever make any significant breakthroughs in that area.

Finally! My programming blog officially moves from Artima to this site, as of now. I’ve been poking at this problem for at least two years. It almost seems like I was unconsciously waiting for the right system to sort itself out, and it has: Jekyll on Github pages (with MarkdownPad for editing) has won over my heart and mind. I’m pretty darn happy about this — I had gotten to the point where it was just too much trouble to blog on Artima, and so a lot of ideas have gone un-captured.