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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …