Bookmarks (13)

This post will describe how I design my programs in Go. I needed this for work, and while I searched for a link, nothing quite fits my coding practices out there. The word “Layered” can pull up some fairly close descriptions, but I want to lay out what I do. Deriving Some Requirements Go has a rule that I believe is underappreciated in its...

As many others observe as well, one of the major reasons to write is to firm up ideas in one’s own head. Serializing an idea out into English words is still no guarantee one understands it deeply, but it is great progress over a very fuzzy idea that has never been fleshed out at all. I’ve known for a long time I wanted to...

I am reliably informed by many people that the core essense of functional programming is the extensive use of map, filter, and reduce, that these functions are superior to for loops in every way, to a degree that they should be jammed in to every possible language with no need to analyze the cost/benefits of such an approach because the benefits are just so...

Up to this point I have not followed through on my promise to offend everyone in general, and in particular, functional-programming-in-imperative-languages advocates. Everything’s been pretty positive about functional programming. This is where the tide is going to start to turn, but I’m going to lead into it a bit before getting really offensive. “Programmable Semicolons” Let’s talk about monads, and in particular, monads in...

Functional programming languages see types not just as buckets of things that can contain values, but as assertions, e.g., this is not just a string that I vaguely hope is a Username, but this is a validated, certain-to-exist Username for a user, and anything that receives an input parameter to some function that is a Username need not run its own validation code on...

At the beginning of this series, I said I was going to annoy every programmer in the world in some way or other. So hang on, here comes one of those super hot takes that I was promising: Global variables… are bad. Alright, for those of you who were not so offended that you instantly snapped your browser window shut, obviously I am aware...

This is another lesson that does not require functional programming to notice, but it is a lesson that functional programming puts front and center whereas independently discovering it from imperative programming may take a long time. Functional programming derives (pun intended) a lot of benefit from its typeclasses, despite them in some sense being second-class citizens in the expression problem to sum types. Much...

Functional programming languages of the type I’m talking about have immutable objects1. For this particular section I’m just going to be talking about “immutability”, so in addition to Haskell, I also include Erlang and any other language with immutable values only. This does not includes languages that merely encourage them, but permit mutability; this discussion is about 100% immutable langauges, where mutation is held...

There is a common metaphor for hyperspace travel in science fiction, where some scientist type explains how the FTL works by taking a piece of paper, drawing a line on it to demonstrate “normal” travel, then folding the paper to bring the origin and destination together. Imperative code affords straight line approaches to problem. I have some code. It does 73 things. I need...

I recommend to any professional programmer that they spend some time with a very strict functional language, enough to get to the point they can write non-trivial programs in it. For the purposes of these posts, you can read functional programming as Haskell. There is an earlier definition of functional programming that just involves having closures, but as all modern1 languages have closures now...

Programming languages seem to have somewhat stagnated to me. A lot of shuffling around ideas that already exist, not a lot of new ones. This is not necessarily bad. Shuffling around ideas that already exist is a natural part of refining them. Shuffling around ideas that already exist is safer than a radical rewrite of existing convention. Even taking a language that already exists...

To set expectations, this is not a sweeping review of the entire industry; indeed, quite the contrary. This is just one guy’s story about his limited experiences with VR gaming. About five years ago, the office I work at allowed some interested employees to host a “VR Gaming” event in the main conference room. It wasn’t sponsored by the company, so it was put...

An increasingly-frequently asked question in the Go subreddit is some variant of: “I have this code but it isn’t doing what I expect it to do.” type MyStruct struct { // definition } type OtherStruct struct { // definition } type MySumType interface { MyStruct | OtherStruct } func main() { myStruct := MyStruct{...} printVal(myStruct) } func printVal[T MySumType](in T) { switch val :=...