In prepping a talk on GPars, the Groovy concurrency library, I’ve been using Grape for dependency management and I must say it’s mad fun. I’m sure there must be some downside or something complicated about it but I haven’t run into it yet!
To get started, you need to set up your .groovy/grapeConfig.xml. [...]

Ok, I hooked ya there didn’t I?
Jeff Brown mentioned some surprise today at hearing that Scala had been anointed as Java’s “heir apparent”.
I say that there will be no “next Java”. Get over it people. There is no “next big language” coming that will capture 20-25% [...]

A while back, I pointed to an article I wrote for JavaWorld: “Actors in Erlang”. That article was an intro to the hardware trends driving concurrency, Erlang, and actor concurrency in Erlang. Yesterday the follow-up, “Actors on the JVM” was published. Part 2 goes through various actor alternatives on the JVM such [...]

I was reading this morning about GParallelizer, an actor library in Groovy and while it has a pretty face, I think it misses the point of using an actor model.
To me, the heart of the actor model is to break free from a per-thread model and instead use larger numbers of lightweight processes [...]

Wow! Tonight was the first meeting of the St. Louis Lambda Lounge, a brand new user group focused on functional and dynamic languages. I was hoping maybe 15 or 20 folks would show up but we had over 30 hard-core language geeks all in one room. Appistry hosted the meeting and very [...]

The Lambda Lounge is a new St. Louis area user group focusing on functional and dynamic languages. The first meeting will be December 4th at 6 pm.
At this point, I think topics for the first meeting have solidified. I’m planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what [...]

I’m having a great time this weekend at No Fluff Just Stuff in St. Louis. I’ve been vaguely aware of Groovy for a long time and my early impressions were that from a language point of view it seemed kind of thrown together and not really the result of a consistent vision.
But [...]