Saturday, October 29, 2011

What is Covariance and Contravariance Anyways?

If you have been following the talk around Google's latest language, Dart, then you might have heard things like "covariant arrays are widely regarded as a mistake" (src). But what is covariance? Why are covariant arrays considered a mistake? Who has covariant arrays? Why?

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Your Favorite Language is Probably Terrible at Concurrency too

The internet has been ablaze with posts on NodeJS, to some people's joy and to others chagrin. Some have claimed that Node solves a long standing problem in concurrency, saying:

People are starting to build more on Node.js because it’s superior and it solves these problems that have always existed. I/O has been done wrong for the last 30 years

In my opinion, Node is bad at concurrency, and guess what? Your language probably isn't any better. But let's make sure we're on the same page first.