Monthly Archives: October 2009

Quaker Plainness in Religious Academia

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 17, 2009

[NOTE: Some of you are probably saying, "Hey, wait a tick, I've seen this before!" I've decided that I'm going to keep http://robertfischer.posterous.com/ for FaceBook/Twitter style status updates, and to use EnfranchisedMind for lengthier things. At first, I was going to keep some non-technical stuff off EnfranchisedMind, but I've reconsidered that. For the sake of [...]

Posted in Metacognition | 1 Comment

null Sucks: A Case in Point

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 17, 2009

Take a look at this API: ClassNode#addProperty. Turns out that if you pass null into getterBlock and setterBlock, you get the default implementations. Maybe1. Normally passing null around blows up in unhelpful ways, but here null is a useful value. How is a programmer to know? I’m increasingly convinced that immutability2 and strong type systems [...]

Posted in Groovy, Programming Language Punditry | 1 Comment

What’s Your Favorite Quote?

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 10, 2009

I’m looking for people’s favorite witticisms, quotes, etc. Double credit if it relates to topics of games, community, language, or education/learning. But here’s the catch: they can’t be in English, German, Hebrew, or Latin (those languages are taken). If you can rock any other languages, I want to hear from you! I know there are [...]

Posted in Books | 6 Comments

Grails Retainer

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 6, 2009

In the past, I have been picked up on some projects for my specialty with Groovy DSLs, GORM, and Grails infrastructure. I am a specialist in those areas, and my rate reflects that. The problem came in if there wasn’t enough DSL/GORM/infrastructure work to be doing: I would then be shifted to other development tasks, [...]

Posted in Autobase, Software Business | Leave a comment

Consumer-Developers and Contributor-Developers

By Robert Fischer | Published: October 5, 2009

An analysis of two very different conceptions of how open source works, and what happens when someone from one camp encounters someone from the other.

Posted in Classic, Open Source, Software Business | 18 Comments

  • Categories