First the loose thinking and the building up of a structure on unsound foundations and then the correction to stricter thinking and the substitutions a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass. Gregory Bateson on the advance of science. (From Steps to an Ecology of Mind) This expresses a process I have observed in developers. … Read moreDevelop before define
How important is correctness? This is a raging debate in our industry today. I think the answer depends strongly on the kind of problem a developer is trying to solve: is the problem contracting or expanding? A contracting problem is well-defined, or has the potential to be well-defined with enough rigorous thought. An expanding problem … Read moreCorrectness
This talk about gradual typing in Clojure makes a case for combining dynamic languages with slowly-more-specific typing. (These days, I like TypeScript for this.) First delivery, Philly ETE ,April 2015: Also, PolyConf in Poznan, July 2015: PolyConf 15: Contracts as Types / Jessica Kerr – YouTube I wish I could find the version from Craft … Read moreTalk: Contracts as Types
After moving from Scala to Clojure, I miss the types. Lately I’ve been playing with Prismatic Schema, a sort of optional typing mechanism for Clojure. It has some surprising benefits, even over Scala’s typing sometimes. I plan some posts about interesting ones of those, but first a more ordinary use of types: locating errors. Today … Read moreFun with Optional Typing: narrowing errors
It is often said that the developer should understand one level deeper than she’s working. If she’s writing Java, she should know how the JVM works. If he’s using a container, he should know conceptually what’s going on inside the container. This statement is true for more than just runtimes and frameworks, but all the … Read moreOne level deeper