[CentralOH] [Central OH] Special presentation with Dr. Venkat
Damien Calloway
damiencalloway at fastmail.com
Wed Aug 8 13:14:06 EDT 2018
Hello all,
Last evening, Pillar hosted one of their Plugged-In events - they hosted
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam
His talk centered around using the new (to Java) lambda construct to
refactor code. I went to see his thoughts on how to break problems down.
Key takeaways :
Simple and familiar is not the same
Cuteness is not sustainable
Functional programming = lazy evaluation + functional composition
David Wheeler - "All problems in computer science can be solved by
another level of indirection."
Procedural programming = pointers for indirection
Object Oriented programming = polymorphism for indirection
Function programming = lambda for indirection
Haskell is the laziest language ever
There was a demonstration of "Execute Around Method Pattern" from Ken
Beck's Smalltalk Best Practices <-- highly recommended for better
understanding of functional thinking
He answered my question - functional programming, while it greatly
reduces errors due to a smaller cognitive load, is not a magic bullet.
You can write bad code in any language
He also feels that "reactive" programming is the future.
The speaker's website : agiledeveloper.com - go to the Downloads link
for articles and presentations, etc.
I noticed that there were copies of the book Functional Programming in
Java being passed around up front.
===============================
Pythonista debriefing :
Most of what was demonstrated involves problems that the native Python
language already solves.
Highly recommended to review Brandon Rhodes talk at PyOhio 2012: here he
breaks down the traditional Gang of Four patterns to see if and how they
apply to Python -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er5K_nR5lDQ&list=PLxd96E9IxfZV4N548nzmzqauC1XmJ5fgD
Also, amongst Pythonistas, the book "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good"
is highly recommended
Smalltalk did influence the design of Python. Objective-C as well. At
around the same time, there was a modeling language called Simula, and
that is where C++ got its object model (and may as well be the root of
all evil....)
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