java

Should you use Kotlin?

tomo — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 05:53:09 +0000

July 8, 2017

I spent some time looking at a relatively unknown programming language called Kotlin today. Kotlin was designed by a company rather than by academics in a computer science department. The company happens to make and sell an IDE so perhaps they are hoping that as the language becomes more popular and programmers need an IDE to use it they will become customers of JetBrains, the company behind Kotlin.

The basic description of the language goes like this: Kotlin is a statically-typed programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine

Kotlin is yet another language that...

The Difference between JavaScript and Java

tomo — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 06:14:00 +0000

March 1, 2016

java javascript node.js

Many non-programmers and young programmers are confused by the names Java and JavaScript. In fact, JavaScript was renamed to JavaScript as an afterthought and a co-marketing campaign together with Sun (the creator of Java). But there are succinct jokes for this naming coincidence: Java and JavaScript are the same like car and carpet, or ham and hamster.

First, the similarities. On a cursory look, some of the syntax of Java and JavaScript code look alike. This is because they're somewhat descended from C (putting them in the Algol family but they are both more similar to C than...

Assembly language vs Bytecode vs WebAssembly vs Asm.js

tomo — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 08:20:00 +0000

January 18, 2016

asm.js assembly bytecode java jvm webassembly javascript

Assembly

In the beginning there was a CPU. And the CPU could be loaded with data which were numbers and these magical numbers would cause the CPU to process those numbers and produce new numbers. This data which the CPU was running, the numbers fed into the computer, was machine code. And all programming of computers that's still done today ultimately ends up turning into machine code for the CPU, binary machine code being the only thing a computer can understand.

But long series of numbers, where each 256 or more unique numbers has special meaning which changes depending...