Month: October 2018

If the free lunch is over, where can we eat for free?

In the first part of this blog post, I wrote about why FP is mandatory for programmers that work on modern software projects. Summing it up, it was like this – modern hardware scales up by adding cores, therefore, if software wants to scale up and well, then it has to do it by going concurrent, and FP is a good choice to deal with concurrent programming issues.

In this post, I’ll write about some differences between traditional and FP programming and I’ll present one more reason about why FP is a good match with parallel programming.

You can write bad code in any language. That’s a fact. So there’s no magic in functional programming to turn a lame programmer in a brilliant one. On the other hand, you can write pretty good code in the functional paradigm by sticking with the tools provided by functional languages.

So, let’s have a look at this FP thing… First, it is evident that this is not your parent’s FP – map, filter, fold… Just a few of the most recurring spells you’d see in a Scala source and none of them was in the notes I jotted down during my University courses. Even looking at my LISP textbook I couldn’t find any reference to the map operation. (Just to help those with no FP background – map (transform in C++) is an operation that applies a transformation to each item in a collection. In other words, if you have a function that turns apples into pears, then – using map – you can turn your array of apples into an array of pears.)

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Lambda World 2018

Back in the XVI century, the Flota de Indias based in Cadiz set out to Americas carrying tools,  books, and settlers and carried back goods, from the new world.

In much the same way I went to Cadiz and set off for the brave new world of functional programming with the intent of carrying back news and techniques for my daily job.

Cadiz is an awesome and is a wonderful frame for one the best conference I attended in 2017 and 2018 – Lambda World.

As usual, I took a lot of notes and possibly soon or later they will land here. I plan to prepare a short summary with information about the conference and briefs of the speech I attended, much I did for Scala Italy. In the meantime, I warmly suggest these awesome notes (by Yulia). Stay tuned.

Scala Italy 2018

At the end of September, my employer sent me to the awesome city of Florence to attend the Scala Italy conference. Thanks to this patronage, this is the third year I’m able to be at the conference of the Italian Scala Community.

For the first time this year, the conference lasted two days with two distinct tracks – talks and workshops. The choice of one working and one non-working day can be a bit odd and likely a symptom of some ambivalence about the target audience. To keep the conference for Scala enthusiasts attending in their spare time or to move it to the professional realm, that’s the question. Given that the ticket price wasn’t very light on pockets, maybe half of the decision has already been made.

I dutifully took notes during all the talks so I’d like to prepare some posts with my notes. I noted that after I did so for ++it 2018 (Channels are Useful, not only for Water, Zero Allocation and No Type Erasure Futures, Time Travel Debug, ++it 2018 – Coroutines – coming soon… ?, ++it 2018 – Key Notes) conference organization put all the conference videos online. I’m pretty sure the same is going to happen for Scala Italy 2018 as well. So I’ll wait for your feedbacks before investing the time needed for writing all the blogs.

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Is Functional Programming functional to programming?

Some 25 years ago I took my class of advanced programming which included exotic paradigms such as logic and functional programming.

As most of the content of that course, FP went into a seldom-if-ever open drawer during my professional career.

Simply I never saw the needs to use Lisp or had the luxury to afford never changing values.

A few years ago (well not that few – just checked it was 2005) I read on DDJ that the free lunch was over. That has nothing to do with the charitable food bank, but it marked a fundamental twist in the computer performance evolution. Something that would have a strong impact on how software was going to be designed, written and tested.

Until 2005 no matter how your code was badly written and underperforming. You were assured that for free, just waiting for the next hardware iteration, your code would have run faster (bugs included)! This is like deflation in economics – why should I invest my money if keeping them in the matters for a year they increase their value?

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