You know Murphy’s Law, right? Or at least you know the way most people remember it: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It’s a fairly depressing way of summarising life, but we all recognise a large portion of truth within it. Things go wrong. All the time.
There’s actually contention over whether this is the original form of the law, which is named after aerospace engineer Capt. Edward A. Murphy, and there are several differing accounts of how the saying came about. My preferred account is that relayed by Australia’s Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, whose record of Captain Murphy’s original exclamation is:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.
I like this version because it’s easier to see the qualified optimism that Murphy juxtaposed with his frustration. As Dr Karl explains, there is a hope embedded in this form of the law because it starts with a proposition: “IF there are two or more ways to do something…” Continue reading

It was an interesting meeting as the speakers were all from the
About two weeks ago, I wrote
Update: The survey has closed and you can
a broad and powerful collections framework
I think the term
With that in mind, I present “Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala”. There are many, many resources on the web for learning about Scala. In fact, I think there’s probably too many! It would be quite easy to start in the wrong place and quickly get discouraged.