The question if living beings, in particular those of our own species, possess "free will", and how it works if it exists, has recently become fashionable again. The new idea that brought the topic back into discussion was that our sense of free will might just be an illusion.

A few months ago I decided to take a closer look at Eclipse, since several people I know seemed to be quite fond of it. I had tried it earlier on my old iBook G4, but quickly abandoned it because it was much too slow. But my new MacBook Pro should be able to handle it. Last week I finally decided to retire my Eclipse installation.

Programmers, scientific and otherwise, spend a lot of time discussing which programming languages, libraries, and development tools to use. In such discussions, the notion of a programming paradigm is rarely mentioned, and yet it is a very fundamental one. It becomes particularly important for parallel and concurrent programming, where the most popular languages and libraries do not necessarily provide the best programming paradigm.

One of the books I read during my summer vacation is the recently published second edition of Rupert Sheldrake's "A New Science of Life". It is one of the most controversial books in science, having been both praised and condemned; a review of the first edition in the renowned science journal Nature concluded that this book should be burnt! The question that Sheldrake addresses in this book is where form comes from.

With the increasing importance of parallel computers, ranging from multi-core desktop machines to massively parallel machines such as IBM's BlueGene, functional programming could well become an important technique for scientific software development, as it facilitates program transformations (including those for automatic or semi-automatic parallelization) considerably.

Among the many characteristics that distinguish programming languages, static vs. dynamic typing is one of the most debated ones. The main advantages claimed by the advocates of static typing are that compile-time type checks make code more robust and that static typing allows a compiler to do better optimizations.

One of my hobby projects over the last months has been the exploration of monads. Monads are packages consisting of a data structure and associated control structures that are used as abstractions in functional programming. They were popularized by the Haskell language, where they play a central role in introducing side effects (such as I/O) in a controlled way into a language that is otherwise purely functional.