The discussion goes on.

In the frame now - should Java get macros, or is there no place for macros in Java?

Well, macros would make implementing James Strachan's J* pretty trivial. But if everyone was able to create their own flavour of Java, how would we read one other's code? Would macros be Java's own Tower of Babel?

Multiple inheritance - good or bad? The only good answer to this is 'it depends'.

There are a number of programming language facilities which can very easily be abused, but which when not abused can be very powerful. Multiple inheritance is one of these. Another which springs to mind is operator overloading.

The designers of Java decided that the danger of including these was greater than the benefit.

The designer of Python decided to trust the programmer to know what he or she is doing. Is this a mistake? I don't think so, but then I've never had to work on a large Python project alongside incompetent developers. Of course, incompetent developers can screw up in any language, so I can't see Python making anything worse.

Anyway, I digress. One of the main good uses of multiple inheritance is 'mixins'. To my understanding, these are classes created specifically to be multiply inherited, and which provide specific behaviours which might be useful to any class. A good example of this in Python is found in ZOBD, an object database. To allow an existing class to have its instances stored in the database, all you have to do is to inherit from the ZODB.Persistent mixin class in addition to whatever your class is already inheriting from.

Java as it stands won't allow anything like mixins, but there is a Java extension, Jam, which does.

A recent developerworks article, Diagnosing Java code: Killer combo -- Mixins, Jam, and unit testing, shows how mixins could be used to simplify unit testing in some circumstances. I'm not sure that this is a killer-app for Jam - unless I'm missing something, AspectJ might be a better approach here. Interesting, nevertheless.

The ASCII banner generator (a web based version of figlet) is fun.

Why in the iSeries category? 'Cos I recently used it to produce a new green-screen banner page. Probably the first new 5250 banner page to have been written in 5 years.

Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery

I find that anthropomorphism really doesn't help me deal with hardware all that much, because it lends a certain attitude of disdain to what would otherwise be a mere malfunction. - Carl Jacobs

A primer to writing TCP/IP exit point programs.

Pretty useful, but FTP is only one of the things which you need to cover. ODBC and JDBC are other important ones, and I should imagine that securing those would be quite a job - you'd need to parse the incoming SQL to decide what was being read and/or updated. Not trivial by any means.

EasyGUI is a module for very simple, very easy GUI programming in Python.

I'm keeping an eye on this.

Easy Struts is a Struts plug-in for Eclipse.

Lomboz, a J2EE plug-in, including JSP facilities, is also interesting.

BTW, Programming Jakarta Struts came recently. I haven't started it yet - I'm still working through Java Development with Ant. But I'm already wondering if I've got the wrong book - Struts in Action looks good, and reviewed very well.

Ah, well, I'll give the O'Reilly book a chance. It's not like they've let me down before.

There has been a bit of a storm in the Java blogging world recently about the naming convention, if any, to use for interfaces. A storm in a teacup, perhaps? Anyway, I tend to agree with Charles' opinion on this.

We had a good blazing row discussion about this at work. We were never going to agree - there are fans of hungarian here! (And not just here, either!) Me, I hate hungarian. I'm a Python man at heart - it's the signature that counts, not the type, so hungarian is emphasising the wrong thing.

More interesting to me, though, is the notion of avoiding use of the 'new' keyword, except when used from within factory methods. Makes a lot of sense to me.

Don't Use System.out.println! is a nice intro to Log4j.

Via Erik.

According to UK IT jobs decline - worst over, it is. For permies, that is.

Fingers crossed - a lot of us are hanging on by our fingernails here.

Update Wednesday 11th December: News of an upturn in the States too.