Two interesting events that my Minnesota-based readers might be interested in:

• Ted Neward will present on Scala at OTUG:
  

  Date: Tuesday May 20, 2008
  Time: 5:00 PM
  Location: 3M Auditorium, Owens Science Hall
  University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
  Free food served afterward - Please RSVP to web@otug.org

  Abstract - The Java platform has historically been the province of object-oriented programming, but even Java language stalwarts are starting to pay attention to the latest old-is-new trend in application development: functional programming. In this lecture, Ted Neward introduces Scala, a programming language that combines functional and object-oriented techniques for the JVM. Along the way, Ted makes the case for why you should take the time to learn Scala — concurrency, for one — and shows you how quickly it will pay off.

  About Ted - Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released “Effective Enterprise Java”. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, four video-game consoles, thousands of books (on programming and otherwise), and eight PCs.

  All the details (and maps) can be found at www.otug.org.

• I’m going to put my name in the hat at In the Loop’s Story Slam. That’s tonight (Wed, Apr 23) at 7:30 at the Bedlam Theater.

Popularity: 2% [?]

robert$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
115 ls
113 cd
52 vi
33 ssh
20 make
14 grails
10 ocaml
10 less
10 find
9 rm


Meh. No great surprises there.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Just wanted to post one quick comment about the “Huge” Brazillian oil field recently discovered. From the article:

A deep-water exploration area could contain as much as 33 billion barrels of oil, an amount that would nearly triple Brazil’s reserves and make the offshore bloc the world’s third-largest known oil reserve, a top energy official said Monday.

Unfortunately, the US consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day (cite). One billion = one thousand million, so this gigantic, third largest oil field in the world, holds only about 1500 days, or five years, of current US consumption. Or, given that the US is about 25% of world oil consumption, only slightly more than a year’s worth of global oil production. And that assumes consumption stays static and doesn’t grow. And this is assuming the oil field is, indeed, this large (note the use of weasel words in the original article- it may be this large, or it may not be. The large print giveth and the small print taketh away).

This is big news, in one sense- we’ve been granted one more year. But that’s all.

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Introduction

One of the things that has consistently been difficult in the whole dynamic typing/static typing conversation is that people don’t seem to understand what a real static typing language can do: here’s a classic example (and someone else who was also annoyed). The dynamic typing vs. static typing conversation seems to be Java’s type system vs. Ruby’s type system, which simply isn’t fair. So, in the spirit of advancing discourse and helping people understand why I enjoy Ocaml so much, let me present…

7 Actually Useful Things You Didn’t Know Static Typing Could Do

Continue Reading »

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Thanks to Jeremy Chatfield of Merjis, I’m now the maintainer of CocanWiki. Just got the OK to put it up on the Ocaml Forge: “CocanWiki“.

Still waiting on Jane Street’s decision on whether Cloud Proxy made it into their Ocaml Summer Project. I don’t want to start hacking on that without the students, assuming they’re going to be in.

Popularity: 3% [?]