Here we go again with a new article derived from my work notes. As you already know, I am rewriting a backend application in Kotlin and — in the process — I am improving all the horrors of legacy code I can find. In this article, we will look at one critical aspect of software development (especially for REST applications): the documentation.

In the last week I converted a medium-sized legacy Java/Spring codebase to Kotlin. In this article I’ll discuss the pro and the challenges I faced during this transition.

This is another not-requested opinion on Deno! But what can I do? When I read “node replacement,” “TypeScript,” and “Rust,” I lose any inhibition. Therefore, I ported to Deno an old npm package and wrote a brief report on my experience. What I liked? What I disliked? Will Deno be succesful in the overcrowded world of programming platforms? These are my answers.

Today has been five years since Rust 1.0 release. I really want to wish happy birthday to this awesome language! I could write an article on it or I can link you to this wonderful post in the official Rust’s blog. Enjoy!

Swift is a pretty language that hits a sweet, sweet spot: it is a compiled language built around LLV, it is modern, it took advantage of decades of programming language design efforts, and it is esthetically pleasing. It is the kind of language that could have taken a lot of market shares. Unfortunately, official Windows support will come only with version 5.3. It may be already too late to wash away the “iOS Language” stigma.

Visual Studio Code is my editor of choice. I started with it because of the top-notch TypeScript integration, and then I stuck with it for all the rest (all but for big projects in languages with outstanding IDE support, such as Kotlin).

During the years, my extension page grew bigger and bigger; new extensions get installed, old extensions get removed. You know, the usual stuff. But during all these years, a bunch of extensions has always remained the same. They are my favorite VSCode extensions, and I am going to list them here.

I dislike Go. I dislike it a lot. Nevertheless, I usually do not bash on it because I am deeply convinced that people should use whatever they want and they like. Many people I respect use Go. I mean, this blog run on Hugo, that is written in Go! How could I be one of “those guys” who always bitch about what other people enjoy?

However, sometimes, I fall into watching discussions in the go community, and they are so absurd I cannot shut up. 

Every now and then, we see some headline about Turing Completeness of something. For example, Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, or even Minesweeper are famous examples of accidentally Turing complete systems.

If you know what a Turing machine is (and you should) you will have an intuitive idea of the claim: you know that X can compute any computable function. Sure; but if you stop thinking about that for a bit, it is not so intuitive how we can prove that. If we think long enough, we can start understanding how X can simulate a Turing machine, but how can we be sure that we can encode a Universal Turing Machine and what is the program of a UTM and how we can prove that it is, in fact, universal?

Kotlin is a really sweet language. It is the perfect thing in between a “super-powerful and but difficult language” like Rust or Modern C++, and a “super-easy but that seems to be designed in the 80s” like Go. With the upcoming release on Kotlin Native, then, you can even ditch the JVM!

However, while IntelliJ is a great IDE, often I do not like to rely on big IDEs — especially when VSCode works perfectly well for 90% of my use cases. Therefore, it is time to see if and how I can use Kotlin in VS Code (and see what is missing).

I am a functional-oriented developer. I have a bit of expertise in game development, especially in Unity 3D. It comes naturally that I am interested in the obvious link between the two: F#.

F# is a functional language of the ML family born in the Microsoft Research and now developed by the F# Software Foundation. Of course, F# run on the .NET framework, the same as C#, the language used by Unity3D. It is clear, then, that we could use F# in Unity. And, in fact, we can with moderate easiness.

Should we? How easy is that? answering these questions is the goal of this article.