Along Came Betty

I spent the weekend on the shores of Lake Huron. During the kids’ naps, I worked through the first 28 problems of P-99: Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems in Ruby. Many have done it before me (in many languages and variations). Many will do it after.

So far P27 gave me the most trouble because I refused to use my brain. Figured it out on a nice long walk with the family. P28 was a pain because I was figuring out how Ruby blocks/procs work. Here’s the code.

p.s. an immutable list, like in Scala (or Lisp, etc, etc), with pattern matching of course, would be handy in Ruby. I wonder if one exists…

ruby 99 problems, ruby

There are a lot of big things (lack of closures, type inference, etc, etc) to dislike about Java. This is a list, in no particular order of little things that make day to day Java development just that much more irritating. Most of these are just convenience methods whose omission is unforgivable. Libraries exist to address all of them, but that’s beside the point.

1) No string join method

How many times have I written this?

2) No way to set additional JVM parameters in manifest of executable jar

It’s really convenient to just double-click a jar … until you need to set your heap size or something and you have to go crawling back to a shell script.

3) java.net.URL constructor throws checked MalformedURLException rather than unchecked IllegalArgumentException

Seriously, what is so special about this exception?

4) java.io.File has no getExtension() method

Same as join() above.

5) No immutable collections.  Collections.unmodifiableList() and friends don’t count

6) java.io.File.delete() silently does nothing if you try to delete a non-empty directory

It’s even more irritating to write deleteFolder() than join() and getExtension().

7) java.util.Random has a setSeed() method, but no getSeed() method

8) java.util.logging is built-in and incredibly lame

They sucked every ounce of the joy out of log4j.

9) JTree selection behavior gives me a headache every time I have to deal with it

10) No method to just read an entire InputStream or Reader into a byte array or string

Same as join() above.

Bonus) No method to copy a file!

java java