When learning Salesforce, you will sooner or later hear that Salesforce’s Apex is “Java-like.” What does that mean, exactly?
Well, for starters, it means that if you already know Java, then you don’t have to start over from square zero to learn the Salesforce back end programming language.
There is…
The so-called “complex numbers” are actually quite simple. The terminology surrounding the complex numbers reflects centuries of ignorance as humans groped for an understanding of how to quantify things that are not solid.
In the study of electricity and in the study of particle physics, it is often necessary to…
We like chess puzzles to always have a single solution. Puzzle authors do, too. But in the context of a game against an actual opponent, the problems that come up usually have more than one solution.
As I’m doing research for a computer chess program to be written in Scala…
You should never write setters. At least so says the common wisdom these days. It’s not what the common wisdom said twenty years ago, when the Java Beans model was formulated.
That’s not to say that the common wisdom is wrong today. Just that the common wisdom generally fails to…
It’s right there in the name: resources, plural, not singular. This one rare case of Java semicolon inference leads people to forget, or to not realize, that a Try-with-resources statement in Java can have more than one resource.
Let’s review the single-resource statement that is more frequently used, and the…
Back in 1968, Edsger Dijkstra wrote a now famous letter to the editor of Communications of the ACM, usually summarized as “Go To statement considered harmful.” That publication is the newsletter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
That must mean that Go To is always bad and you should…
When the Java programming language and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) first came out in the 1990s, the JVM was slow. Computers in general were slow back then, compared to how fast they are now.
For example, if you wanted to write a Java program to display the Mandelbrot set…
The Mandelbrot set is perhaps the most famous fractal. When Benoît Mandelbrot first saw an image of the set that would one day bear his name, he was probably looking at a black and white print-out that took several minutes to complete.
At first he thought he had made a…
JUnit was one of the major breakthroughs in Java programming. In the couple of decades since version 1.0 first came out, JUnit has become so entrenched that most Java programmers now take it for granted.
Legend has it that JUnit, perhaps the most famous unit testing framework ever, was created…
It is fairly common in unit testing to test that a particular unit throws an exception under certain conditions.
Once in a while, though, you want to make sure that no exception occurs at all, and you have some idea of what exceptions might occur in the early stages of…
