An Architect's View

The slides and code for my first presentation at cf.Objective() 2013 are now online - Polyglot Lessons to Improve Your CFML:

• Learn You a What for Great Good slides (PDF)
• Learn You a What for Great Good code (Github)

The other presentations will be posted after I've given them and the code will appear in that Github repository.

[UPDATED] Welcome to 2013 and at World Singles we are expanding our development team! We're looking for self-motivated people in two very different roles, working remotely from their home office.

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I just happened across this quote about Java:

We've also seen a new light in the OO world. A language that promises portability and simplicity, a faster way to build tomorrow's application: the distributed application. Of course, I'm talking about Java. Is it all hype? Is it the new saviour? Hopefully, you'll all be convinced that it is neither. It is, however, an extremely important development and provides us with yet another tool with which to solve the problems around us.

Although early days yet, Java too will need standardisation in order to "facilitate commerce" as they say in the standards' world. That effort is expected to begin shortly but we do not know yet how it will progress.

Can you guess when that was written? Or who wrote it?

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I recently completed 10gen's MongoDB for Developers online course. It was the first time they had run the course so there were a few bumps in the road - and Superstorm Sandy closed 10gen's New York office for a while - but overall it went very smoothly, especially considering they had over 20,000 students sign up!

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I strongly agree with The Pragmatic Programmer's advice to learn a new language every year if you can and that was why I was recommending Seven Languages in Seven Weeks to anyone who would listen.

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World Singles is looking for a smart, motivated developer to join our small, fully distributed team of engineers, working on our multi-lingual, multi-tenant Internet dating platform. We're after someone with strong data management skills who can help us mine and analyze data in both MySQL and MongoDB, as well as help us leverage both more effectively. For more details: http://bit.ly/worldsinglesjob

The World Singles code base is a blend of CFML and Clojure - this role would be mainly on the Clojure side of the house but the primary skills needed are MySQL / MongoDB.

Starting on December 5th and running for six weeks, the author of "Clojure in Action", Amit Rathore, is leading an online introduction to Clojure course for just $325. See the CodeLesson web site for more details on this Clojure course.

I'm fortunate that Amit is local to me so I've attended two of his one-day training courses already. In fact my first real introduction to Clojure was Amit's "ProClojure Bootcamp" back in May 2010 and it was a great jumpstart. More recently I attended his "Day of Macros" course which was pretty mind-blowing. Each of those cost $199, so the six week online course is great value since it will cover all of that and more!

If you're at all interested in Clojure, this would be an excellent way to come up to speed and find out what all the hype is about - for a very reasonable price!

Yes, it's the 256th day of 2011 which means it's Programmers' Day! Want something fun to do by way of celebration? Hop over to SaaShr.com and take part in one of their cash prize competitions to create a video or graphical homage to programmers! Thanx to Josh Davis of SaaShr.com for letting me know about that.

On July 13th, 2011 Robert C. Martin (aka "Uncle Bob") gave a talk at Skills Matter in London called The Last Programming Language. He was scheduled to give a version of it as the keynote for ACCU 2011, a conference I remember with fondness from my days back in England as a member of the Association of C and C++ Users! You can read Martin's blog post about the talk here but note there's a $2 charge to watch the version linked from that blog post - the Skills Matter version linked above is free.

TL;DR: He asks whether we've exhausted all possible programming paradigms and languages and whether we should now consider a single standardized programming language (and offers a suggestion of what that might be). Preposterous?

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The final "Early Access" version of Manning's "The Joy Of Clojure" by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser is now available with the print edition becoming available on March 25th. I bought this back at the beginning of September 2010 and it's been wonderful to watch the book evolve through the early access program. It's a very entertaining and, at times, challenging book that really gets into the "why" of functional programming and the fun you can have with a language in the Lisp family. I find myself re-reading chapters over and over again to really soak in the concepts and approaches - and functional programming is pretty much what I started with back in the early- to mid-80's. It's very rewarding!

This final version now includes the foreword by Steve Yegge of Google (a very entertaining and thought-provoking blogger whom I've highlighted a couple of times here on this blog). I'd like to quote the closing paragraph of Steve's foreword:

"Lisp - the notion of writing your code directly in tree form - is an idea that’s discovered time and again. People have tried all sorts of crazy alternatives, writing code in XML or in opaque binary formats or using cumbersome code generators. But their artificial Byzantine empires always fall into disrepair or crush themselves into collapse while Lisp, the road that wanders through time, remains simple, elegant, and pure."

And that, to me, is why Lisp, Clojure and this book are such a "Joy" to work with!