I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for quite some time now and a Fedora user for just as long. The first distribution that I ever used was Fedora 2 and even though I’ve used extensively other distros I’ve ...

Prelude I’ve recently upgraded all my systems to Fedora 15. The default installation is not very usable for some tasks for several reasons - like CD size limitations and software patents for insta...

Prelude So far in the Java.next() series I’ve discussed only languages that were engineered from the start to run on the JVM (Groovy, Scala and Clojure). However, a lot of good programming languag...

Prelude Back in the day when Ruby wasn’t particularly popular outside Japan there was only one book in English about Ruby - “Programming Ruby”, affectionately called the Pickaxe by most Rubyists. ...

Prelude This is the third part of the series of Java.next(). Last time we’ve discussed the merits of Scala - an OO language with a strong emphasis on functional and parallel programming. Today we’...

Zenburn is a popular colour theme for vim, developed by Jani Nurminen. It’s my personal belief (and probably that of many of its users I presume) that it’s one of the best low contrast themes out t...

Prelude This is the second post from my series dedicated to modern programming languages for the Java platform. Last time we’ve discussed the Groovy programming language, which is a member of the ...

Java.next() In a series of articles labeled “Java.next()” I’ll be discussing modern alternatives to the Java programming language for use with the Java Platform. This is the first installment of t...

Disclaimer If you’re looking for a flame post - this is not one of them. I love both languages and I’ll simply compare some of their features and possible uses. Prelude Ruby or Python? This is t...

One task that often recurs in programming is the need to parse a string representation of a number(or several numbers) and convert it to its numeric value. Parsing integer value in Common Lisp is f...