Question: Whats the average age of a ruby programmer?
It would be much more interesting, if both of them would be over 18 and one of them would be a girl… so they could actualy record the “Conception of JRuby” … but you would have to pay for that kind of content!
I am currently going through several interview-processes. During the last technical interview I realized, that my knowledge of my favorite programming languages is not as profound as I would like it to be. I always dismissed this shortcoming with the excuse, that such "low-level stuff" was not my primary concern. But now I remembered a quote from my German teacher:
Those without sophisticated vocabulary will stay unredeemed!
- Markus Lüdin
Thinking about the truth of this, I set out to learn to express myself: My first stop was the try-catch-playground in C#-world.
| In the sandbox a toddler had built the following: try{ return true; } finally{ return false; } |
 |
I stopped and began to stare ... schizophrenia started to fill my head ... but fortunately my buddy, the C#-Compiler, stepped in and rebuked the toddler: This was not allowed!
But the toddler was not so easily intimidated: He dug and sculpted with his little hands, and as I stayed and watched, schizophrenia slowly crept back into my head:
try { throw new ArgumentException("First Ex!"); } finally { throw new ApplicationException("Second Ex!"); }
 |
A inexplicable urge came over me, and I started to build fervently my own constructs in the sand around those of the toddler: |
[Test] public void First_Exception_Is_Lost() { SchizophreniaTrap trap = new SchizophreniaTrap(); try{ trap.TryFinallyException(); } catch(ArgumentException ex){ Debug.WriteLine("Caught First Ex"); Assert.Fail("Ha! Things dont just disappear!"); } catch(ApplicationException ex){ Debug.WriteLine("Caught Second"); } }
Oh no! The test passed! I started to scream! The first exception was lost! It had to be there somewhere in the sand! I started digging...
The Mythical Man Month is the Bible of Software Engineering, everybody reads it but nobody does anything about it!
- Frederick P. Brooks
 |
A project becomes a year late one day at a time. |
Plan to throw one away. Software is like waffles: Throw away the first. |  |
 | Extrapolation of times for the hundred-yard dash shows that a man can run a mile in under three minutes. |
Add little to little and there will be a big pile. |  |
 | There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy. The only constancy is change itself. |
I am going to give a workshop about Object Relational Mapping at the Workshop-Days of the Swiss Open Systems User Group.
The workshop will take place at the ETH Zurich, on the morning of September 12.
This is going to be a basic workshop that aims do give an overview and an introduction to the topic of object relational mapping.
I am going to talk a lot about patterns and techniques. I am going to illustrate this theoretical background with concrete examples realized in Java Hibernate and Ruby Active Record, since those are two very popular, yet different ORM-implementations.
The following workshop in the afternoon is going to be all about Hibernate. The lecturer will be Christian Bauer himself (one of the two Hibernate-Gods and author of Java Persistence with Hibernate). I am a bit nervous about that... I mean to set the stage for a god is quite a responsibility ;-)
As a lecturer I will be allowed to attend other workshops for free. Of course this chance for knowledge-sucking comes close to my notion of paradise!
I plan to attend Rund um den Software-Architekten, Hibernate (awe and worship) and Introduction to JBoss Seam (some more awe and worship).
But there is still a lot of work to do until then...
I blogged about Join Tables and Domain Models before, where I showed different ways to deal with 'association-entities' in Ruby and C# 2.0.
Now in C# 3.0, LINQ offers another interesting way to express a domain model.
Assume the following object model:
Article has associated Users through the 'association-entities' Readings. Now LINQ allows us to express this association in another elegant way:
private readonly List<Reading> readings = new List<Reading>(); public IEnumerable<User> Readers { get { return from reading in readings select reading.User; }
}
When I think about LINQ its mostly in the context of querying data, which is usually a common task in the data access layer. There LINQ allows us to specify what part of a domain model should be loaded.
But the above example shows us, that LINQ can be used in other scenarios, even in expressing our domain model itself.
 | Hello, my name is Jonas and I am an addict! I am hooked for several years now. I have not written a single line of code without being on Resharper! If I am put in front of a clean Visual Studio, I am getting nervous: My hands begin to shake, sweat appears on my forehead and I feel the distinct urge to download at least a trial version of Resharper... I admit it: I am an addict! |
