Skip to main content

I like statically typed languages

I had to refactor viibee's internal structure of how we handle locations and was so glad that ActionScript is statically typed. Otherwise, I would have freaked. So, to my surprise, I must confess that I like statically typed languages.

Duck typing may be the latest craze, but right now I do wonder why it sometimes works so well.

Maybe it works OK in Rails because the amount of code one writes is typically less (so refactoring by hand is usually doable) and the structure is given (so you know where to look), plus you can use tests, of course. I guess in Rails the feedback one can get from tests and quickly running the app is almost as quick as what my Flex compiler tells me.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan...

CMS vendors now and then

CMS analyst Janus Boye has just published a post on CMS vendors that discontinue their products (because they get bought out or similar) During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued That sentence reminded me that I had given a talk almost 10 years ago (it was in 2001 exactly) that contained a slide on the CMS market at that time: The circles denote vendors that were part of CMS market overview articles by popular German IT magazines in that year (I wanted to show how differently the market place could be perceived). A vendor placed in any of the circles had enough attention to be part of at least one evaluation. The vendors outside of the circles were not part of any of these overview articles, but somehow present in the market place - at least I knew their names back then. It is interesting to look at the landscape from that time. Of course there are a number of well-known vendors that got bought (Vignette, Obtree, Gauss...

Note on running Apache OpenWhisk actions locally for development

When you develop an action for Apache OpenWhisk it can become cumbersome and time-consuming to upload the action to your OpenWhisk instance in order to test it. This is especially the case when your (Node-based) action contains NPM dependencies. You can always use Node.js to run the action locally. However, ideally one wants to run in an environment as similar to the cloud as possible - in this case run within an OpenWhisk Docker image. This is where runtest.sh comes in handy: it does exactly this - run the action locally in an OpenWhisk container. I hope this tool will make it into wsk or a similar tool for local OpenWhisk action development.