C would be Judaism - it's old and restrictive, but most of the world is familiar with its laws and respects them. The catch is, you can't convert into it - you're either into it from the start, or you will think that it's insanity. Also, when things go wrong, many people are willing to blame the problems of the world on it.
Java would be Fundamentalist Christianity - it's theoretically based on C, but it voids so many of the old laws that it doesn't feel like the original at all. Instead, it adds its own set of rigid rules, which its followers believe to be far superior to the original. Not only are they certain that it's the best language in the world, but they're willing to burn those who disagree at the stake.

PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity - Fights with Java for the web market. It draws a few concepts from C and Java, but only those that it really likes. Maybe it's not as coherent as other languages, but at least it leaves you with much more freedom and ostensibly keeps the core idea of the whole thing. Also, the whole concept of "goto hell" was abandoned.

C++ would be Islam - It takes C and not only keeps all its laws, but adds a very complex new set of laws on top of it. It's so versatile that it can be used to be the foundation of anything, from great atrocities to beautiful works of art. Its followers are convinced that it is the ultimate universal language, and may be angered by those who disagree. Also, if you insult it or its founder, you'll probably be threatened with death by more radical followers.

C# would be Mormonism - At first glance, it's the same as Java, but at a closer look you realize that it's controlled by a single corporation (which many Java followers believe to be evil), and that many theological concepts are quite different. You suspect that it'd probably be nice, if only all the followers of Java wouldn't discriminate so much against you for following it.

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Read more: AegiSub

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Tags: Relax

Fundamentals

The fundamental concept behind Swarm is that we should “move the computation, not the data”.
The Swarm prototype is a simple stack-based language, akin to a primitive version of the Java bytecode interpreter. I wanted the proof of concept to be quick to implement, while demonstrating that the concept could work for a popular runtime like the JVM or Microsoft’s CLR.
Update (Sept 17th 09): Swarm is now implemented as a Scala library, so you program in normal Scala, rather than a custom stack-based library as with the prototype described here.  It uses the Scala 2.8 Continuations plugin to achieve this.  See end of blog post for further information.

The Prototype

The prototype is implemented in Scala, and I will use snippets of Scala code below, but a knowledge of Scala won’t be required to understand the rest of this article. I chose Scala because I wanted to learn it, and because its rich semantics tends to make coding easier and faster than Java (my normal language of choice).
As with the JVM, there are three places to store data in the Swarm VM: the stack, a local variable array, and the store. The stack is used for intermediate values in computations, data here tends to be very short-lived. In the prototype it is implemented as a List[Any]. The local variable array is for data that is used within a block of code (its implemented as a Map[Int, Any]).

The “Store”

The “store” is somewhat analogous to the JVM heap. It is used for long-term storage of data, indeed, in an actual implementation it may be persistent, and/or transactional, but in the prototype it is in-memory. The store contains “objects”, each of which is a list of key-value pairs. The values may be references to other objects. The store is implemented as a Map[Int, Map[String, Any]].

Read more: Hypergraphia Indulged

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Tags: Programming

Hibernate's Criteria is a very comprehensive API which provides the user alot of flexibility to write dynamic queries. But of course nothing is perfect. I came across a situation where i had to truncate a date field in order to get the correct result set without considering the time portion. While going through the Criteria API I did not find anything which allowed me to do this. And hence in the path for a solution i found out that Criteria allows for plain SQL syntax to be included which i thought was a big plus point because it gives the developer the flexibility without restricting him/her just to the API.
The following code depicts the way you can incorporate plain SQL to your criteria API.

DetachedCriteria testCirteria = DetachedCriteria.forClass(Employee.class);
SimpleDateFormat dateFormatForSearch = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
Calendar joinDate = empSearchDTO.getJoinDate();
if (joinDate != null)

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Tags: NHibernate, SQL