Interesting Links – 5 Oct 2016

  • In Accounts is Everything Meteor Does Right, Pete Corey points out that Meteor‘s Accounts package dictates how user authentication and authorization will work, period, and that this removal of choice actually makes it entirely usable. Having wrestled with Shiro and Crowd and Spring Security and JAAS, it’s a point that’s hard to argue with – and while users of Shiro, etc., will probably say that those packages work as well as Accounts does, I’d have to humbly disagree, even while acknowledging how nice it is to have things like Shiro and Crowd. It’d be nice to have something that was just as drop-in for Java was Accounts is for Meteor. (Meteor is, BTW, a reactive application framework for NodeJS.)
  • User jdlee posted Maslow’s hierarchy of dev needs from Twitter – One gets the impression that the developer’s needs weren’t being met when designing that graph.
  • Also from jdlee, who was apparently crawling Twitter: “In Ruby, everything is an object. In Clojure, everything is a list. In Javascript, everything is a terrible mistake.”
  • User adimit gave high praise to Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests, saying that “it’s really simple but helping me write a test-driven app right now” and (coming from a Haskell background) “I’ve always hated OOP, but now I see how to do it properly, and it can be fun.” Anything that helps code quality improve is awesome, if you ask me.
  • From DZone: The Rise and Fall of Scala describes the apparent slow demise of Scala. The author backs it up, and it’s not a bad article; Scala’s awesome (I love it) but the criticisms are quite valid. Two areas where the author sees Scala remaining strong: Big Data and custom DSLs, definitely two Scala strengths.