February, 2005

The FBI just spammed me:

Dear Sir/Madam,



we have logged your IP-address on more than 40 illegal Websites.



Important: Please answer our questions!

The list of questions are attached.





Yours faithfully,

M. John Stellford







++-++ Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-

++-++ 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 2130

++-++ Washington, DC 20535

++-++ (202) 324-3000

The attachment was a zip file named 'indictment_cit.zip', but it didn't contain any FBI questions to answer, just the Sober worm.

I'm so disappointed. After watching so many episodes of Law and Order, I was kind of looking forward to the real thing.

Question: What are the largest integer and long literals allowed by the Java compiler? Bonus points for explaining what is odd about them, and a possible reason that the Java design team allowed this seeming inconsistency.

PS: There are two answers, either of which I would consider correct.

My new weblog, “nocommas” is up and going at nocommas.blogspot.com. Nocommas is my platform for raving about how neat my children are and ranting about politics.

Cardboard.nu will continue to accrete technical content at the rate of a few posts per month.

7:00pm on the second Thursday of each month is the default time for Python meetup groups all over the world. That’s March 10 for next month. I suppose it’s supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy, knowing that there are little groups of true believers congregating at the same time, all over the world.¹

If you’re interested in meeting with other Python programmers, it’s worth checking python.meetup.com to see if there’s a meetup group near you. If not, you can always start one.

Here in Sydney, we’re meeting at the James Squire Brewhouse, starting 6:30, Thursday March 10. Hope to see you there!

¹ Allowing for timezones.

I had always thought the unary plus operator was useless, but no, you can use it to cause odd compile errors. Take this program for example:

  1 public class Hmmm {

  2     public static void main(String[] args) {

  3         byte b = 0;

  4         b = +b;

  5     }

  6 }

It has a "Type mismatch: cannot convert from int to byte" error on line 4. The unary plus causes the value of b to be promoted to an int before it is used, and of course, one can't assign an int to a byte without a cast.

And I thought Java was a nice, simple language.

I went along today to hear James Gosling talk. For me, the most interesting question was on scripting languages.

James said that Sun won’t support any one of the scripting languages over the others because, “If we say Groovy is it, the Jython guys will come after us with knives.”¹

So it looks like Sun are sitting back, waiting to see if any scripting language will become popular enough to be worth supporting, which is probably the wise thing to do at the moment.

The big two JVM scripting languages are Jython, an implementation of Python for the JVM, and Groovy, a completely new, JVM specific language.

Jython is mature and usable, but it’s development was on hiatus until recently. Jython’s only real problem is that it naturally appeals to only a small audience: programmers that know both Java and Python. Since Jython doesn’t have a Java-like syntax, Java programmers tend to dismiss it, and CPython programmers tend to avoid Jython because they need to learn Java and the Java libraries to get the benefit of running on the JVM. All that said, more and more Java developers are learning Python as Python’s industry mindshare grows. There is a chance that enough people will get excited about Python on the JVM to grow Jython into something big.

Groovy, on the other hand, is specifically aimed at Java developers, but it is not yet mature enough to use in most real-world situtations. Groovy has quite a number of challenges ahead, including defining the language and managing public expectations about the status of development. I think Groovy has a good chance of delivering a production quality implementation in the next 12 months. If they do, and the IDE vendors introduce Groovy support, then there is every chance that Groovy will be making its way into enterprises in the later half of 2006.

Personally, I hope both Groovy and Jython go on slug it out for developer mindshare over the next few years, but if I had to pick one over the other, I’d pick Groovy.

¹ In truth, I can’t remember if it was “knives” or “an axe”. Gosling mentioned both kinds of weapons at different times. Anyway his point is well taken – those Jython advocates are dangerous :)