TL;DR – Clojure’s threading macro keeps code in a legible order, and it’s more extensible than methods. When we create methods in classes, we like that we’re grouping operations with related data. It’s a useful organizational scheme. There’s another reason to like methods: they put the code in an order that’s easy to read. In … Read moreLeft to right, top to bottom
TL;DR In Java, get a library that makes Futures work like Scala’s, and then never use ExecutorService directly. In the beginning, there were Threads. And Java threads were nice and simple. That is, Java threads are simple like some assembly languages are simple: there’s only a few things you can do. Since then, Java and … Read moreAbstractions over Threads in Java and Scala
In Java, an ExecutorService manages a pool of threads that can run tasks. Most ExecutorServices treat all tasks the same. Somebody hands it something to do, the ExecutorService parcels it out to a thread, the thread runs it. Next! A ForkJoinPool is an ExecutorService that recognizes explicit dependencies between tasks. It is designed for the … Read moreForkJoinPool: the Other ExecutorService
TL;DR: When you need an ExecutorService, the Executors class has several for you. Sometimes it doesn’t matter which you choose, and other times it matters a LOT. The above flow chart is approximate. If it’s simple parallel computation you’re doing, then a fixed pool with as many threads as CPUs works. If those computations start … Read moreChoosing an ExecutorService
Did you know that a thread can achieve deadlock with itself? It can happen in any thread pool of constrained size. Watch out for… Pool-Induced Deadlock! [1] This is easiest in a pool of size 1. Run a task in the pool, and from there, run a task in the same pool. While the outer … Read moreFun with Pool-Induced Deadlock
TL;DR – functional programming taught me that LSP is a special case of PLS: Principle of Least Surprise. One thing that bugs me while reading Java: I’m reading along, come to a method call, ctrl-click on the method name, and get a list of implementations of the interface. IntelliJ can’t tell me exactly what will … Read moreWhat FP taught me about OO: Liskov Substitution Principle explained
In philosophy, there are very few things that can’t be doubted. The basic laws of logic are among them. There’s one that seems completely obvious and indisputable to normal people: Law of Identity: Everything is identical to itself. In my audiobook, the professor is going on about how not only is this statement true in … Read moreTwisting the rules of logic in our code
For all the programmers who don’t deeply grok the lambda calculus terminology — Say you are about to call a method on a container, and that container can give you something back of type Tweet. What you really want isn’t a Tweet, but some part of it, say Tweet.getId(). What if, instead of getting the Tweet … Read moreFunctors: What the funk for?
In the beginning, there were Iterables. And in the old world of Java, they were good. We could perform the advanced for loop on them. for (Thing item : listOfThings) { // do stuff to each item} And we could perform it again and again. for (Thing item : listOfThings) { // do more stuff … Read moreIterators in Scala: glory and danger
The checkstyle plugin brings code quality checks into the gradle build. This way, if team members are using disparate IDEs or have different settings, consistent coding standards are enforced in the build. Here’s how to add checkstyle to your Java build in two steps:1) In build.gradle, add this: apply plugin: ‘checkstyle’ checkstyle … Read moreusing checkstyle in gradle