In software, everyone agrees that testing is good, but there is a lot of disagreement on the level of testing that is necessary. Fortunately, there is not an industry standard or government software code that mandates certain testing because this industry is still figuring it out. The hypothesis of this article is that if you can't afford to test it, you can't afford to sell it

InfoQ video interview with Erlang creator Joe Armstrong. Includes discussions of why Erlang succeeded in concurrency where ADA or other languages didn't, what Joe would add to Erlang (hint: Optional Typing or Static typing for certain situations), and more. Also: interesting for everyone plagued by Garbage Collection pauses: an explanation how Erlang's shared-nothing processes make GC pauses history.

Sure, the die-hard developers snigger at the idea, but the upsides are enormous. (How does $130k sound?)

Using Scala to solve Euler problem #67 & #18 demonstrating how concise the implementation can be.

Content of my talk on "JSR-296 Swing AppFramework from the trenches".

A few years ago a friend of mine tried to convince me to learn ASP.NET because it was much better for my career than PHP. Not because ASP.NET is better than PHP but because .NET web development is a profession while PHP is only a skill.

Are you guilty of subconsciously regarding ’scripting’ languages as inferior? Do you think real programming means using C, C++, C#, or Java? Does your conscience accuse you of laziness when you feel tempted to use a truly high-level language for your app?

For several years we have been hearing requests from you for a fix for the class loader problem, 4670071, in which custom class loaders can deadlock. We recognize this is an important issue for many of our customers and apologize for how long it has taken us to find a solution.

On February 10, 2007, Steve Yegge told us the Next Big Language would arrive within the next 18-24 months. That means that it will happen sometime within the next three months. I can hardly wait!

Why the sudden interest in Java? Because Java memory model is very relevant to C++0x. The keyword here is sequential consistency. Java enforces sequential consistency on all access to volatile variables. C++0x introduces atomic objects which, by default, also follow sequential consistency. So C++ atomics will, by default, behave almost exactly like Java volatile variables.

Checklist for before relaunching a bug-free, optimized website.

In a previous article, The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer, I discussed the flawed Software Management Formulas (SMFs) that form the basis for many decisions in computing. The SMFs suggest the best way to reduce development costs is to find cheaper programmers.

Last time I was negative and sarcastic, so this time I want to be positive. My best days as a coder were...

I have been stupid busy and am stacking up blogging topics like cordwood. Maybe it’s because of that guilt that I am about to tell you about the absolute worst piece of software I ever gave birth to.

You may have already read Justin Van Patten's post about the upcoming breaking changes to the String class for .NET 4.0. This change will affect the behavior of the String.StartsWith, String.EndsWith, String.IndexOf and String.LastIndexOf methods by changing them to perform an ordinal (byte-for-byte) comparison by default instead of a culture-sensitive comparison using CultureInfo.CurrentCulture. In addition, the default overloads of String.ToUpper, String.ToLower, Char.ToUpper and Char.ToLower will be changed to use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture instead of CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.

I presume you are sold on the goal of achieving fine grained parallelism – if not please read that post. In that post I talked quite a bit about the need to partition our work into many small chunks.

I will write a series of posts about what concurrent programming is, what the ideal general purpose concurrent programming language should be like, about certain patterns and approaches that can help realize the promise of the ideal concurrent programming language, the problem in approaching that promised utopia, the current research etc.

A large software company discusses how it uses TDD and Scrum to manage large, distributed Continuous Integration 2.0.

Showing once again that concurrency is hard, even if you know what you're doing.

One interesting question I had at my Java 7 talk this past weekend was whether JSR 203 would support an in-memory virtual filesystem. Interestingly, this is exactly the same question the first time I read the JSR 203 spec.

A quick opinion on why the economic recession is a great time to start your own business.

We’ve been using IronPython for three years now with a lot of success.The great thing about it is that it allows you to benefit from Python’s syntax while getting most of the advantages of .NET.

Reprinted from IEEE Software, vol. 18, no. 3, 2001.. Here are the most frequently forgotten fundamental facts about software engineering. Some are of vital importance—we forget them at considerable risk.

Yesterday I was switching our test automation driver layer from WatiN to Selenium RC (Firefox / Chrome / Opera support and I was livid with the COM errors from IE in WatiN). I think I'm glad that we made the switch, but it took quite a bit of trial and error to bend Selenium RC to my will. That and something else I read today got me to pondering the worst days I've ever had as a coder trying to make unfamiliar or confusing technology work.

It may not seem important to those of us who develop server-side Java software, but size matters. If you distribute your software on CD or DVD, you aren’t going to worry about 10 megabytes here and there. The only Java developers who tend to put as much thought into optimising for size as they do into optimising for performance are those that work with JavaME and its constrained environments. However, network-launched software, such as applets and Web Start applications, can suffer greatly from bloated binaries too. In an era when users are used to interacting with AJAX web applictions and snappy Flash-powered content, a start-up time that rivals that of a cassette game on a C64 is going to set your application apart for all the wrong reasons. Of course, maybe your software is so good that it doesn’t matter about the load time and people will use it anyway. Then you have another problem. If you aspire to have a huge number of users for your huge application, data transfer costs are going to bite.