Disclaimer: All opinions expressed herein are my own and don’t necessarily reflect that of my employer. Caveat: I hold these opinions and make these recommendations specifically with respect to high school students (or casual hobbyists). I have a friend in my neighborhood who teaches high school computer science. When she happened to mention that she was trying a new curriculum for one of her classes, I asked her which programming language she was planning to use in her class. ...

• programming
• education
• python
• javascript
• java

I was recently assigned to a new project at work, which requires some concurrent programming. I’ve long put off investing in any formal Java programming texts, partly out of thriftiness and partially because none of the professional programming I’ve done to date required a formal education/reading of relevant texts to avoid writing completely incorrect code. Usually in line-of-business application development, a sub-optimal solution is not completely incorrect; at worst, it wastes CPU cycles. ...

• java
• programming
• software-engineering
• concurrency

This is a continuation of the ideas from “Is Kotlin the New Java?”. What is Lombok? For those of you who are not familiar, Project Lombok is a build tool for the Java programming language, which adds nifty capabilities that many Java developers feel they sorely lack. Some of the more vanilla features include: “Getter” and “Setter” generators “ToString” and “EqualsAndHashCode” generators “Data” and “Value” class generators Automatic resource cleanup Not-Null assertions Builder class generators Constructor helpers of various sorts There’s also a few more exotic features (which I personally have not seen developers) use in the wild, but which no doubt someone is using, including suppressing checked exceptions, lazy fields, magic “val” keyword, delegation, “with"ers, util and helper classes. ...

• programming
• java
• kotlin

One of the programming languages I’ve (essentially) been ignoring for the past couple of years has been Kotlin, the “better Java” from Jetbrains, the author of IntelliJ and other IDE’s.1 Recently, Kotlin has come back into focus for me for the following reasons: Google finally announced official Android support for Kotlin Steve Yegge, that infamously opinionated programming language enthusiast, wrote a patently Yeggian post about how Kotlin scratches his itches without supporting academic or impractical features. ...

• programming
• java
• kotlin
• clojure
• scala