I hate to beat a dead horse and all . . .

. . . but this is pretty egregious.  I got so sick of writing my own partition code in Java (since I’m so used to being able to do it easily in GScript) that I pushed it out into a utility method so I wouldn’t have to rewrite the same code over and over.  Thanks [...]

Pragmatic Type Systems

What do static type systems provide and what do they cost? It’s tough to know what to make of the dynamic vs. static typing arguments going on right now on sites like Artima without having solid answers to these two questions.
The Benefits
Static type systems have been developed mainly by the academic community, and they [...]

Engineering As Failure Avoidance

The common view of engineering is that you’re building something up:  successively adding parts, features, layers, etc. to eventually achieve some sort of functional goal.  That general view holds whether you’re building a bridge or a piece of software.
There’s another way to look at engineering, though, and that’s as the art of failure avoidance.  When [...]

The Necessity of Type Inference

Type inference is a subject near and dear to our heart here at Guidewire; one of the primary features of GScript from the very start has been type inference of local variables, and it’s proven over the years to be one of the more invaluable features in the language.  So invaluable, in fact, that it’s [...]

Frameworks and Foreign Languages

I spent part of my recent vacation in Spain, and since I don’t really speak Spanish I was forced to get around by simply parroting certain key phrases. I always feel strange speaking phrases in a language I don’t really understand, since I don’t really fully understand what it is that I’m actually saying; [...]

Why I’m Not a Fan of Java’s Auto-Unboxing

Starting with Java 1.5, the Java compiler started automatically taking care of converting boxed versions of primitive types into primitive types where necessary, and vice-versa.  While I’m generally in favor of anything that makes programming languages easier to use, provided it doesn’t overly-complicate things, I’ve never been a huge fan of the way it was [...]