Editor's Daily Blog

Pumpkin Soup

Using more than one pot

Start with the bones left over after carving the turkey. Roast them dark and then boil them to extract a nice turkey stock. While the stock is simmering, slice two sugar pumpkins in half, remove the seeds and sprinkle them with salt, pepper, thyme, and a little oil. Bake them until soft. Strain the broth. In another pot, sautee some pancetta and add carrots, onions, and celery. Back to the soup pot, add this aromatic mixture along with the broth and the pumpkin flesh. Puree.

A simple soup that involved half a dozen pots. The preparation included two different meats and four different vegetables. There were four or five different methods of preparation involved in preparing this simple soup. The people eating the soup today won't know or care how many pots were cleaned or techniques were used.

In continuing the cooking analogies - I've been thinking about that pumpkin soup as I read discussions of using and adapting different languages. Reach for the tool that you need. Sure, there are some people who all their life cook with one or two pans in the same way they did when they first learned to cook. For many for whom Java was their first language, you hear the single pan approach in their posts.

Before directing you to an essay on Language Oriented Programming, I want to make one other comment about this particular pumpkin soup. We're eating it today and yet I made it Tuesday night. I learned this at a restaurant I worked in. The chef served "yesterday's soup" instead of "the soup of the day". He said that most people know that soup always tastes better the next day so that's when he serves it. This gets to John Mitchell's Slack post. It would be nice to have the time to work ahead on some project and let it sit. You could then come back to it in a couple of days and have the fresh perspective to improve it before serving.

Enough tortured metaphors - I'm heading over the river and down I-71 to grandmother's house. It's Thanksgiving here in the US. I'm most thankful for Kimmy-the-wonderwife, our two wonderful children, and this world full of people who have been so kind to me this past year. Whether or not you celebrate this holiday, best wishes.

In Also in Java Today , Sergey Dmitriev wants "the freedom to create, reuse, and modify languages and environments." In his essay Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm he is concerned with "the limitations of programming which force the programmer to think like the computer rather than having the computer think more like the programmer. These are serious, deeply-ingrained limitations which will take a lot of effort to overcome. I'm not being pretentious when I say that this will be the next big paradigm shift in programming. We will need to completely redefine the way we write programs."

The ACM feature Kode Vicious answers a question from a reader that begins Do you code in only... KV answers "choosing a language to use is not an easy task. The majority of coders just use what they're given at work and don't question that. Not questioning is bad. We should always try to find the right tool for the job. Then, once we've found the right tool, we can spend endless hours yelling at our co-workers for not using the same tool we do."

In Projects and Communities, check out the Java User Group community home page for a list of upcoming JUG meetings and add yours to the list. Also, the Java Tools community homepage features an announcement about project Leafcutter "an API which allows you to execute Ant tasks from Java code. "

In today's Weblogs, John Mitchell blogs on Thanksgiving, Reuse, and Slack. He asks a key question for software, "Is there enough slack in the system to allow it to function reliably and robustly in the face of change? Most developers are exposed to this notion in practice in dealing with performance but slack is crucial in all aspects of software."

I hate repeating myself in code. In today's Forums, Dondi_Imperial asks "How many times have you had to write code where you had to compare variables against a single value?if(someString == "correctval" || anotherString == "correctval" || anotherOne == "correctval") What about something like this instead.if (someString || anotherString || anotherOne == "correctval") "

DenisMo responds to a comment on Enhanced @since in Javadocs. He points out "Java doesn't allow backward-incompatible changes in method signatures, which roughly means that other parameters, checked exceptions, return values won't be changed. Therefore, @since can only be practically be applied to method or class. [..] BTW, your idea fits well into the JSR 260, don't hesitate to post it and other Javadoc ideas to this JSR."

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• P2P Sockets 1.1.4
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Comments

• Daniel,

  Wow, a post on Thanksgiving; impressive dedication!

  From my family to yours; best wishes, and thanks!

  John

  Posted by: cajo on November 26, 2004 at 03:07 AM

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