hg vs git, pull+merge vs rebase

@pastebin

GIT encourages rebasing, which leads to rebasing of your public and other people's
code. This is bad.

Mercurial, which hashes a changeset's place in history as well as it's
content, discourages rebasing. Rebasing happens in private with mq patch queues.
Public trees are merged. This is good.

Either style is possible with both tools. The difference is the default emphasis.

Defaults matter.

Linus Torvalds on rebasing:

* http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Git_Management
* http://lwn.net/Articles/291302/
* http://lwn.net/Articles/291303/
* http://lwn.net/Articles/291304/


Matt Mackall on synchronizing (pull + merge, don't push, don't rebase):

* http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2008-July/020116.html
* http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2008-July/020131.html

Scala Roman Numbers

kata

Scala Exercises

I have completed Tonny Morris Scala exercises. (maybe I'll put them on the svn as well, or maybe mercurial ?)...
Anyway some observations:
- it felt like doing the 'Little Schemer' in Scala.
- after doing 3-4 exercises, you feel the need to use/implement fold_left/fold_right.
- maximum is buggy: what's the maximum on an empty list? (the maximum found must be contained in the list;reasoning related to 'Noumenal Null'). I believe that this exercise is a 'tricky question' and instead of throwing an exception, or returning Nothing or Int.NaN, probably the signature should be changed to : maximum(x: List[Int]) : Option[Int]

- In the List's implementation of map/filter/... they use instead of pattern matching if x.isEmpty ... else ( do_something(x.head, x.tail). Probably it's faster than pattern decomposition.