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Considering programming languages

Posted by daniel on September 7, 2004 at 12:59 PM EDT

Notation,not technology

In today's Forums , Rhythos agrees with Paul Graham that "languages are just notation, not technology, and evolve just as quickly as math notation does: real slow. " Rhythos continues "Programming languages are just programmers way of expressing certain concepts. But there are more concepts than can be expressed using an given high level language. What sort of other concepts can't we express? The first that comes to mind (because I find it interesting) is that of AI. It is generally accepted that most current methods of AI aren't quite right. So there must be something in the list of concepts that we can express in our current languages that is missing (if you accept that intelligence can be codified that is). "

John M provides a link to those responding to Why nerds are unpopular advising that you "Check out 'A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys': http://www.completeevil.com/geek.html"

In one hundred years, meidezhao writes, "Most of programming work will just assemble different components together through a powerful IDE providing all the phases of software development. The components will be written in different languages including AI languages, and can be purchased from some major component providers."

In Also in Java Today , Martin Fowler considers the question Is Fixing an Unknown Bug Refactoring? This question was raised because the reactoring "Introduce Null Object" can alter behavior. It can eliminate a situation in which a null pointer exception could be thrown. Fowler then asks and answers the question " If you fix a bug you don't know about is this still a refactoring?" He notes that his answer may change.

There are features in native widgets that are often missing from Swing components. In the JavaWorld article CloseAndMaxTabbedPane: An enhanced JTabbedPane, David Bismut and Krishnakumar Pooloth build on the JTabbedPane to add a button to close the tab and another button to maximize the tab. Their example increases the size of the tab rectangle and adds the buttons and the required mouse handlers.

In today's Weblogs , Joshua Marinacci has been "been pondering mini-apps more and wonder why they can't actually jump from machine to machine." In Visions of truly portable applications., he asks "Can we get our favorite portable runtime to transport applications around in cute candy colored installable jars? I want my portable applications to really be portable: at the code, installer, and UI level."

In Projects and Communities , the Swank project is a scriptable toolkit for building GUIs with a Tk-like paradigm. It is the GUI toolkit companion to the scripting language Jacl (Java Command Language) analogous to the pairing of Tk and Tcl.

The JavaPedia page on Jar files includes information and links on what a jar file is, how jar files can be created (using the jar tool, an Ant task, zip utility, or from your Java application), jar variants such as WARs and EARs, related open source utilities and online articles.

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