Those who can do sometimes can still teach

I just finished Martin Fowler's new opus, Domain Specific Languages.  Years in the making, it's a good read.  It's Fowler, so that's not a surprise: even if I disagreed with everything he wrote, I'd still enjoy reading his work.  I don't want to regurgitate it here but suffice to say that the book is laid out in a form familiar to Fowler fans (the first half is a narrative and the second, a reference).   You may not think DSLs affect what you're currently into but if you're involved with technology at all, you'd be wrong.  You might also be surprised at what Fowler considers DSLs and his ideas around fluent interface driven APIs (fluent APIs are generally a bad thing from a design perspective when viewed purely in an imperative light but are essential in the context of a DSL).

Speaking of good writers / communicators, I've been lucky enough to have been introduced to James Iry's blog in recent months, now that I've down deep into the Scala rabbit hole at work.  I'm into my third month of every day Scala coding and loving it more having had a chance to develop in anger with the language.  I was off put by Scala when first playing around with it last year, thinking a hybrid Object/Functional language was a Bad Thing.  It most certainly can be a bad and overly complicated thing, but that's true more or less of any language in the wrong hands.  But with the right infrastructure built up around the scala core (maven plugins, the right libraries, Spring, Scala IDE plugins - Eclipse, Intellij and Netbeans all have working versions that are everyday getting better), it's the simplicity that I'm left with.  And I love the Object/Functional bifurcation (OO in the large and functional in the small tends to be the best approach for most things, I've found).  Anyway, back to James.  The key of success with Scala (or any functional language) is to understand the basics around FP.  One of the key concepts is the Monad.  The concepts and properties around Monads can be a tad intimidating to the uninitiated but like many things, at their core, Monads are pretty basic.  James has some of the best blog posts around such topics, laid out in such a way even us mere mortals finally get it.   His 4-parter on Monads are a case in point.  Check it out.