You never touched Groovy, nor did you jump on the Scala train. Clojure never attracted you; and you heard about Ceylon long after the language had already died. You are one of those old-fashioned Java folks! But now, after all those years, you want to join the cool Kotlin kids. So, where to start? Let’s discover the language together by decompiling it to Java code. Today: the Kotlin Class!

You never touched Groovy, nor did you jump on the Scala train. Clojure never attracted you; and you heard about Ceylon long after the language had already died. You are one of those old-fashioned Java folks! But now, after all those years, you want to join the cool Kotlin kids. So, where to start? Let’s discover the language together by decompiling it to Java code. Today: Functions!

Jim has been coding for many years. Slowly he went from novice techie to battered veteran. The soft skin on his chin in now covered by a lush beard. The JVM does no longer hold it’s secrets like it did before. But one thing still bothers him: "Most Web-based frameworks use some kind of annotation-based Dependency Injection. How do they make it work? And could he do it himself?"

The living room was dimly lit, with the only source of light being the glow of the computer screen in front of a young woman. She sat cross-legged on the floor, headphones on, typing away furiously. Her grandfather, a wiry old man with a thick beard, sat on the couch behind her, watching her work with a sense of pride and wonder.

Do you like stories? Tales that move you out of the ordinary into the extraordinary. Do you take satisfaction in programming? Where every bit, every keystroke means exactly one very thing. Do you esteem transparent functionality above all else? Then read on, to get introduced to a land of farmers, magick and wizards. But its wizards are programmers and its sorcery is called F#…​

Cologne. Anno Domini 1470. For over two hundred years German craftsmen have been working on the cathedral close the Rhine. At the very moment, master Tilman is busy decorating one of the pillars in the left center of the nave. He has done this profession for his entire live. His hands carve a figure from a grey stone. First the baby Jesus emerges. Then a head, a body and finally the feet of a man come into view. It is the saint Christopher. According to legend, together with the divine child this saint carries the burden of the entire world. It is a marvel to watch the skilled worker chisel a man from rock. And yet, if you watch him closely, you start to wonder if he really has to use his old tools. Wouldn’t he do his job even better with new shiny gear? Does the veteran artisan really know all the tricks, or could even he learn something new?

The end of the year has come again. For one, it’s a moment of celebration last year’s achievements, for the other it’s a relief a new year will dawn. The old will soon be replaced by something new. There is both beauty and sadness in the circle of life.

Finally, the well deserved break. As this pandemic forces me to work from home for too many days now, I treasure every moment I can walk in the open. So I grab a lunch out of my kitchen and step outside. Breathing in the fresh outdoor air, I try to let go of all tension. Tomorrow I’ll have to give a presentation to my fellow programmer buddies. And to be honest, I am quite stressed about this. How should I convey my message? Yeah, I made some slides. But still, will they really understand it? How can I even get them to stay focussed all the time? Especially now I have to do present remotely.

In the modern western world, a watered down version of Haṭha yoga is becoming more and more populair. Many describe the focus on physical posture and breathing techniques to be both pleasant and calming. In everyday’s world of stress and deadlines, a moment to relax and release can come for some not often enough. If you ask your common developer about ‘release’ though, chances are high they do not talk of relaxation but of stress and hard work. I was thinking about this when I wanted to release a Gradle based Java FP library I am writing for my specialization.

Outside the Java community, Java is often regarded as an old and verbose language. Though I love writing Java code, I kind of have to agree with this. New features are implemented slowly and looked upon by the language designers with thorough suspicion. For example, support for multi-line strings has been tried multiple times before Java got official support^[1]. If we are talking about verbosity, the Java language needs quite some characters to write a simple function. As I am specializing in functional programming in Java this year, I struggled a lot with this. Read along how I tackled this a little.

A while ago I was working on a Spring REST project and had a special wish. I wanted for one endpoint an exception thrown when someone requested it with an object with unknown properties. All the other endpoints with their rest objects should continue to exhibit the same behaviour. Let me share how I did this.