Java: Pass by Value

Ever since I started coding in Java I’ve been regularly obliged to participate in conversations debating whether Java is a pass-by-value or pass-by-reference language. I’ve never been particularly hazy on the matter; Java is strictly a pass-by-value language and the values which are passed are pointers (to a memory location representing the data you are …

Battling with Django Inheritance: Subclass Casting

For a day or so now I’ve been battling with Django’s model inheritance, which has a particularly frustrating approach to dynamic polymorphism.  The problem is that when one is implementing a group of related models using multi-table inheritance and you attempt to iterate over the bog standard QuerySet for the parent class, we see an …