Helltime for September 13

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

• Now here is a post that has me thinking about my latest foray into Erlang. Gojko Adzic opines that the Actor model of concurrency is the next step in object-orientation and actually forces people to write better objects. I’m not so sure that is the case. First of all, I don’t think I would design a system where every would-be object is a process instead. Second of all, because of the first point, people will probably only inject concurrency where it is needed for better performance. Those seams in the code aren’t likely to coincide with fantastic object design.
• Get your balance on at CodeBalance and compare five different ways to implement the Singleton pattern. It’s a good read, and a reminder to let your runtime environment handle as much of that stuff as you can. This has production defect written all over it.
• Old-timer Alfred Thompson offers sage advice from academia: objects aren’t the right tool for everything. It is a specialization of the saying “when you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail”. He touches upon something I’d like to get more into, and that is integrating different, diverse languages in a single project. I’m not talking about Scala and Java, or F# with C#. Common frameworks are for wimps.

Announcer: You’re reading the EIP web-ring.

About these ads