Easyshout

1. Live in another country for a year.
2. Start a company
3. Take care of my family – This is always in progress.
4. Skydiving
5. Move to California (I already visited a bunch of times!)
6. Get married so someone that actually shares an emotional connection. (Is this even possible?)
7. Have a son and name him Richard L. Burton IV
8. Get a pet dog and name him “Ballsy”
9. Learn to cook
10. Speak at a very large conference
11. Publish a book
12. Publish a technical article
13. Take a trip with my mom on a plane (She never was on a plane. I setup multiple dates with her but I need to force her hehe)
14. Spend more time with my brother (In progress!)
15. Own a home
16. Retire young (40s)
17. Work on Wall Street
18. Start a charity

These things are in no order and I intend to grow the list out!

During the talk about how Google’s AppEngine now supports Java, I figured let’s play around with it. I started my Eclipse and followed the instructions found at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/eclipse.html, but noticed the update-site URLs didn’t work. So I submitted a quick tweet that read:

Eclipse for Google #AppEngine site-update is broken see http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/eclipse.html

In less than 2 minutes Mike Repass was quick to follow up with a tweet to find out what the problem was! For those of you who don’t know, Mike Repass is the product manager on the Google App Engine project.

Now that’s what I call “Excellent Response Time!”.

Keep up the good work guys!

Update: The fix is to remove the ‘update-site’ per Mike’s request.

@rburton Update is coming soon, but I think correct links are also on this page: http://code.google.com/eclipse/docs/getting_started.html

Today I was reading Obie Fernandez’s blog posting which singles out Alex for his choice of Scala. I personally don’t know Obie, but I have friends who do, so I want to express that this entry is not a personal attack on Obie or an effort to slob Alex’s knob. It’s my personal opinion (subject to public scrutiny), but I’m not looking to take part in such a pissing contest which requires a high power fan to be placed in front of me.

The blog posting has a smell of BileBlog without the substance. As a person interested in this debate between Ruby and Scala, you should look at the facts and not the personal opinions being sold. Alex makes many claims about how Scala is a better fit for Twitter, which I personally agree with, but once again let’s ignore opinions and look at the facts.

Scala was designed with the mindset that Object-Oriented and Functional Programming paradigms both have a place in the world of Software Engineering. The combination of these two paradigms make Scala a ‘Scalable Language’. Let’s take a look at how Scala can scale up based upon the size of a project.

Scala can serve has a scripting language to solve rather simple tasks without a load of bloated code and unnecessary declaration of objects. This allows you to write quick scripts that clearly express the problem at hand without a load of noise. But as a project starts to grow, it’s important to be able to ’scale up’ with Object-Oriented concepts. This is done though the creation of components with a statically typed language. I can’t stress the latter of the previous sentence for large code bases. It can be argued that with proper test cases and good developers, you don’t need a statically typed language, but the world isn’t perfect.

There are many things that Scala provides outside of the two points made in the above paragraph, like interoperability between Java, Actors (which yes, is found in Ruby, ErLang, etc.) and many more items which I won’t go into here. I believe these important things were never mentioned in Obie’s argument. Instead he made personal attacks on Alex’s virtual ’star’ and doesn’t provide any reasonable arguments against using Scala.

For these reasons, I’m left to believe Obie’s post was done with intentions of going against the grain and draw attention for his own financial benefit. His company Hashrock and his books are heavily based on Rails, so naturally he feels the need to defend his source of income. Just because you’re objective for defending Ruby is financially motivated, it doesn’t mean Alex is doing the same.

- Richard Burton (rburton)

Every blog starts out with a first posting, so this is my initial posting. I hope you find this blog worthwhile.

Richard L. Burton III