Someone found Yet Another Post (YAP™) insisting that the Gang of Four (GOF™) patterns were on their last legs. The email was misleading, because this is not precisely what the article said. The bottom-line was that Design Patterns in general are merely a response to gaps in the underlying programming …

https://dzone.com/articles/learn-python-overtakes-learn-java I've seen companies making sincere enterprise-wide commitments to doing all data analysis in Python. There's no reason for quants and analysts to struggle with Java. I field one or two questions a week from folks pushing the in-house envelope on data acquisition. I also field …

Seems silly at first.

http://blogs.perceptionsystem.com/infographic/java-vs-python-programming-language-productive

It's mostly true. It's also incomplete.

For example, "no tuples in Java" ignores http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/apidocs/org/apache/commons/lang3/tuple/package-summary.html.

It seems like the only interesting takeaway from the infographic is that Java …

Let's talk small. When writing API's, it sometimes helps to have a small demo web site to show the API in a context that's easy to visualize. API's are sometimes abstract, and without an application to provide some context, it can be unclear why the path looks like that or …

The correct answer is: It Doesn't Matter. In spite of this. (A) The question gets asked. And worse. (B) It gets answered. And people take their answers seriously. As if there are Profound Differences among programming languages. Among Turing Complete programming languages there are few Profound Differences. The pragmatic differences …

I'm old -- I admit it -- and I feel that command-line applications are still very, very important. Linux, for example, is packed full of almost innumerable command-line applications. In some cases, the Linux GUI tools are specifically just wrappers around the underlying command-line applications.

For many types of high-volume data processing …

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially impossible to answer. And yet, the question persists.

There are three rules for figuring out which is …

Check out this item on eWeek: Java, C, C++: Top Programming Languages for 2011 - Application Development - News & Reviews - eWeek.com.

The presentation starts with Java, C, C++, C# -- not surprising. These are clearly the most popular programming languages. These seem to be the first choice made by many organizations.

In …