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Erb Cooper

Erb Cooper has been programming for nearly 30 years, 17 of those professionally. He studied at New York University and Columbia University. He adopted Java early in its life (early 1996) and has been doing nothing else ever since, though he has recently discovered the joys of Python. Many years ago he co-authored 2 books with Henry Mullish, one of them a C textbook and the other a book of games for the Commodore 64. He is currently active in the Intellij IDEA developer community (http://www.intellij.org , http://www.intellij.net/forums/) and works at Liquidnet (http://www.liquidnet.com).

 

javaerb's blog

What's the deal with Delegates?

Posted by javaerb on January 22, 2004 at 8:21 AM PST

So I've been reading a bit about this battle between Microsoft and Sun ... I mean between C# and Java ... about something I think is called a delegate. The above URL describes them in the context, strangely, of Visual J++. From what it looks like to me, all that C# really has that Java does not is the ability to, effectively, have one method per callback interface.

A funny thing about XP

Posted by javaerb on September 23, 2003 at 12:50 PM PDT

My company is not really an eXtreme Programming shop, but we are somewhat inspired by it. We are currently doing a project in which some people are involved in pair programming. I recently witnessed an amusing situation involving this practice. The team that works at the other desk in my office found a bug which they could not figure out.

The Terror That Is Autoboxing

Posted by javaerb on September 11, 2003 at 10:25 AM PDT

Don't I have anything good to say about anything? Well, yes I do. I have learned to love Python. Which means I should not be a stickler for strong typing, and therefore autoboxing should be right up my alley.

Where are my transparent windows?

Posted by javaerb on August 12, 2003 at 1:47 PM PDT

Have you noticed that I do a lot of complaining? Today I am wondering why Java has no direct support for alpha levels on windows or non-rectangular shapes. Every windowing system in the world seems to support this. Sun has done a good job moving toward support of multiple monitors, unusable screen real estate, and so forth.

The immensity of the JRE

Posted by javaerb on August 7, 2003 at 1:12 PM PDT

Is there anything in the world Sun does not consider a "core" API? Just like everyone else in this Brave New World of broadband Internet and gigabyte hard drives, they figure nobody will mind downloading 14 Meg.

Java 1.5: The end of Java?

Posted by javaerb on July 21, 2003 at 12:14 PM PDT

Return with me, if you will, to the early days of Java. It was hot. People started using it when it was alpha; by beta, there was at least one book out, Netscape supported it, and people were already using it on their web sites.