Category: Kev’s Blog

Christopher Diggins posts an interesting question in his blog on Artima related to the different programming paradigms that have become a popular discussion point over the last couple of years, especially with the increasing popularity of scripting/dynamic languages, regarding the relative merits and disadvantages of static verses dynamic languages.

A static language is one that has static compile-time type checking, whereas a dynamic language is one that that has runtime checking and variables do not have to have fixed types (ie they can change type at runtime).

Diggins proposes that this argument between static or dynamic, or even functional verses imperative programming approaches (functional languages promote programming via the use of mathematical evaluations, and imperative programming is focused on the evaluation of sequential commands) is almost redundant, since no one single approach is usually sufficient to solve a complex problem. The problem though is that languages such as Perl that offer ‘more than one way to do it’ become so difficult to master and use well, that they actually become used less as a general purpose language.

The other problem I believe is that to offer a truely general purpose language you will lose the ability to solve certain types of problems well due to the fact that you will have to make compromises to be general purpose.

This articles poses some interesting questions worth thinking about. I believe at the core though, you have to realize that you should always pick the tool that is most suited for the job at hand (within the constraints of the current problem: budget, time, resources etc) – sometimes this may be a collection of different tools that together allow you to solve the problem. Looking for one solution that will fix all problems is not guaranteed (in my opinion) to be the best solution.

Sun Labs are currently working on a research project to investigate the possibility of searching for music, not just by track and group, but by the actual ‘content’ of the music.

This is a facinating idea, as I’ve often wondered how it would be possible to be able to search for other songs that sound like this particular song that I like. The Sun project is analyszing characteristics in the sound so that comparisons can be made between other songs to find simularities.

Google have announced yet another search facility on their site, this time offering the ability to search open source code that is publicly available.

This may be useful for developers looking for snippets of example code, for example how to use a particular API.

The guys at PS3 Magazine recently got their hands on a actual production PS3 console for an afternoon to review – ie this was not a dev kit that the software houses have had for the past several months, but an actual PS3 console from the production line.

This is the first time that a functional console in it’s production configuration, not a dev kit or a mock up, has been seen outside of perspex boxes at trade shows or Sony’s presentations on stage for the media. And what was the result – the guys were very impressed on lots of points – check out their review for more info. They have a few pictures too, and apparently did have a video of the box booting up and navigating through the PSP-like menus, but Sony apparently asked them to take it down.

The bad news this week – Sony’s stock price took tumble after reports from the Tokyo game show that the PS3 consoles on display for people to play with kept crashing and had to be reset, from what was suspected to be overheating. The Washington Post has a report with more info here. Sony have dismissed these claims, stating they do not have any known overheating problems.