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New user? Thursday, February 28, 2008
Thermal Depolymerization
YouTube: 400 Billion Dollar Secret
Watch this video on YouTube, very interesting to think that our landfills, especially all that organic waste, can easily be turned into fuel.
More information here:
Wikipedia: Thermal depolymerization
Google Search: Thermal Depolymerization
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Quality Begs for Imagination!
Michael Feathers: Quality Begs for Object-Orientation
The crux of Michael's argument is that imperative languages provide easier ways to "substitute one piece of functionality for another without editing". He calls the ways this can be done "seams". Some examples of seams mentioned in his post are: subclassing, preprocessors, function pointers(!), and link substitution.
(Check out his post to see the example Java code he bases his argument on)
He almost might have tricked me into thinking he had a point, but... function pointers? If he'll consider function pointers a seam, how do functional languages lack seams? Functional languages treat functions as first-class values, they can be passed as arguments to functions, assigned to variables, stored in data structures, be composed.... all of these properties, especially taken in combination, burst seams left, right, and centre!
I'm seriously disappointed to see someone involved with the "Beautiful Code" book lack the imagination to think of ways programmers could design adaptable code using functional languages.
