review

The King, the Jedi and the Prodigal Son walk into a bar…

Gregory Golberg holding forth , , ,

So, earlier I tried to switch to Blogger briefly, because my LiveJournal was messing up javablogs feeds (and I wanted something trackback-like).

But then I missed this tag/label/category functionality thingie, so I had a brief affair with Movable Type, but then, voila — The New Version of Blogger. Good, I don’t have to host the stupid thing then…

Peter Kriens has been working too much: “Today an interesting project proposal drew my attention: Corona. Ok, the name is a bad start. The Apache model of names without a cause is becoming a trend.” Eh? I was with you until the last sentence — but it’s not an Apache model of names without a cause, it’s a model of — aw, geez, there must be a pithier term for it — names for things associated with main product that are in some ways puns on the original name (JavaBeans, Jakarta, etc.) Get it? Sun – Eclipse, Eclipse – Corona? (Things will really get out of hand — with horses! — when a Corona-associated product will be called Dos Equis).

Just say no to Holub

Gregory Golberg holding forth ,


Boo-hoo! You had me, and then you lost me!

Frank Sinatra

При чем тут голубь?

Репортаж с Первых Весенних Олимпийских Игр

Yeah, yeah, we do want to “Just say ‘No’ to XML“. Amen.
And +1 to Mr.Holub for noting that “…many so-called programmers just don’t know how to build a compiler. I really don’t have much patience for this sort of thing.” But
it’s all downhill from there:

  • -0.1 for describing Ant as a “scripting language” (it really is declarative…)

  • -0.4 for picking on Ant, of all things, in the first place. Some people can write a compiler and still manage
    to subject “every one of [their] users to many hours of needless grappling with”, oh, I don’t know… make???

  • -0.5 for plugging his book at the end

  • -10 for doing the above with an innocent “By the way”. (+10 if this “innocence” is tongue-in-cheek, Lt.Columbo-“Oh, and just one more thing”-like. But
    “architects, consultants and instructors in C/C++, Java and OO design” don’t do this kind of subtlety.)

In all, Mr.Holub is 10 in the hole for this round…

A classic case of how a perfectly defensible thesis is ruined by the examples…

BOOK REVIEW: “Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins”

Gregory Golberg holding forth ,

I suppose this is more of a praise of Eclipse plug-in architecture and available documentation than a review of the book per se, but I did not get from Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins anything I could not by scanning online docs and playing with Eclipse myself. I was up and running with my plug-in project in a very short time without opening this book, and once I did, I did not find anything I have not already learned or known where to turn for more info…

It may be easy to say that many such books are just a rehash of the wealth of online information already freely available, but sometimes the books do have added value, say, by presenting the material for faster learning and/or reference. In this case, there can be no such added advantage – again, because the Eclipse project’s own design and documentation is very clear and thorough…

I realized all that before getting the book; in buying it, I was looking for another advantage – hidden tips and tricks, kind of like Covert Java. For example, how do I debug a plug-in project that depends on a non-plugin one?

No such luck.

I’ll be returning this book to the store now, and maybe trying to see if Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins is closer to what I want…