Aviv's Blog Things I've Learned the Hard Way

Virtual Machines and Dynamic Languages.
(Not Virtual Machines of Dynamic Languages - the VMWare kind).

I'm trying to abstract away the  Image and ImageList classes, and I'm forced to ask myself:

What are images doing in the core of the game? It's not like it can display them, or even manipulate them – they are part of the UI, and that's the only part of the application where they have anything to do!

InteliJ, which is probably the world's best Java IDE, has gone open source!

After Sun's JDK and Solaris, this basically means that for most applications, the open sourced solutions are not only just-as-good as any commercial tool you may find -- they're quite often much better!

Well, it appears that Space Trader didn’t run on Linux. Once I looked inside, it was obvious why: I forced it to use a Windows-like Look-and-Feel, which is only available under JVMs for windows. this took about a minute to fix, but that’s when things really started not to work.

Joseph D. Darcy's latest post shows why making something like Java is hard (Go there -- its got pictures!).

It also shows why I believe the Java platform is much better than .NET.

Consider the following situation:

1. A client code C calls a BI-method B via a very-simple-technical-wrapper-method W.
2. C (sometimes) gets an unreasonable result.
3. The whole deal is production-grade code.

Who is most likely at fault?

There are many levels to a computer program: From the logical / theoretical meaning of every top-level line, through quite a few layers of abstraction, down to the CPU commands executed, including the tools (Compiler, Linker, IDE...) used and the future readers of the code.