Beautiful illustration of feature branching with git

Vincent Driessen posted a while back a rather beautiful illustration of feature branching in git. I wish I had not missed it when first posted (2010). And just what I needed — he includes git command line instructions for executing the model. Posts like this are what make the Internet so helpful in my day-to-day work life.

Gosling and JoSQL

Ran into James Gosling promoting hash maps and RAM as an alternative to SQL. My team has as positive experience with this approach. Coupling it with JoSQL for a SQL-like syntax we can query our object collections. Adding a ZQL ANSI SQL parser and some simple AST editing, we can take pure SQL where clauses and find matching objects in our maps, performantly too. Custom SQL functions are a bonus.

Why Carnegie-Mellon is one of the best undergraduate computer science educations in the world today

I usually link to individual blog posts that catch my imagination — this blog was started as a way for me to recall and find such posts again. Today is an exception.

Robert Harper is a professor in Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon. His blog, Of Course ML Has Monads! « Existential Type, chronicles his freshman introductory course in functional programming among other topics. Lately I have been looking into Haskell as an alternative to Java at work for some kinds of projects. Harper's posts on ML is opening my horizons further.

The main problem with Haskell or ML is the lack of a good JVM port. Clojure is the next best thing, they all being moral equivalents of LISP even if quite different on the surface.

Back to point. Though the blog is young, I have enjoyed each of Harper's posts and hope he continues. And I with each post I learned something. He is a good teacher outside the classroom. Alas, I was a music major.

Moving Java to Haskell

I am enjoying Tim Carstens' post that translates Java to Haskell focused around monads. It is clean, complete and just how a guide for the novitiate should look.