Posts

Facets of Immutability

Immutability, the cornerstone of functional programming, has many facets.

Not every (mainstream) language supports all the facets; at least not per what each facet stands for. That’s what I will talk about today. The various facets of immutability from a theoretical perspective, and briefly show how some of the mainstream languages have adopted and support these facets in their own way.

A Paradox of Braces

A great deal of thought goes into language design. Eric Lippert’s posts is a living testament, at least for C#. Syntax and idioms are also part of the language design. When designing a language, the designers have to also consider its future. For instance, when designing C#, Anders and others should have thought of and planned for what’s coming in then upcoming version(s) of C#. Such level of forethought might be seem daunting for an outsider. But the language designers are good at what they do, and most importantly, they know what they are doing. Well, in most cases! More ...

C++/CLI Primer – An Apress Book

Earlier this year, I wrote¹ about publishing² C++/CLI Primer on [LeanPub.com]³. I wondered if there is anybody else besides myself and Microsoft using C++/CLI but readers surprised and humbled me with their support. Seems C++/CLI is here to stay. Know why?

A couple of months back Apress⁴ Publications took notice of the book and offered to publish/print. So here it is: C++/CLI Primer for .NET Development, my first book; who would’ve thought 😎

Problem Reduction

Problem Reduction is what I call when a given problem can be expressed in terms of or solved using a solution to an alternate problem. Take for instance, the word distance problem: Find the shortest distance between two words in a given set of words.

Importance of Semantics

semantics | /sɪˈmæntɪks/ | noun (functioning as sing)

‐ the branch of linguistics that deals with the study of meaning, changes in meaning, and the principles that govern the relationship between sentences or words and their meanings the study of the relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent (logic)

‐ the study of interpretations of a formal theory

‐ the study of the relationship between the structure of a theory and its subject matter (of a formal theory) the principles that determine the truth or falsehood of sentences within the theory, and the references of its terms

Application Models

A typical business application is composed of several flows or use-cases. Also, these flows consist of logical ones like a transaction that spans several flows. Take for instance an e-commerce application which consists of user registration/login, product lookup, and one of the most important interactions in an e-commerce application – the shopping cart, and much more. Although these application flows might appear to be discrete and independent of one another, it is after producing a working solution that we realize that these flows are inherently interrelated for one reason or another. The idea of designing stateless application flows is many times confused with the relation between the flows. More ...

Iterators vs. Generators

Yes, there is a difference. Although both produce the same end effect, an iterator is not the same as a generator. The difference is in the way it is implemented and also consumed. Iterator is a (design/implementation) pattern while Generator is a language construct supported by the compiler. More ...

Mundane vs JINQ Way

New things are not always instantly accepted. Beyond skepticism, new things challenge the comfort people are accustomed to. JINQ wasn’t particularly welcomed. It was either discarded as unknown angel or worse … ridiculed. However, JINQ still promises expressive succinct code. More ...

Text Editors

I am not a *nix commands expert … but a professional? So why not relish educating my brother a couple of nifty commands, especially – find and grep, which he was looking into at the time. You can find a few more here if you are interested.

So much for the command line, watch out for the overdose¹. I find it funny when people, especially developers, copy files on the command line on a Mac (or Ubuntu for that matter); I mean files on the local machine. Specifically, they either copy the file (Cmd-C) via the Finder and paste it, or worse drag and drop, on the Terminal ²(/posts/text-editors-rundown/#fn-1559-2). Our next laugh is about editing local files in vim 😆³.

Selective Combinations

You have a list of strings with which you have generate ordered selective combinations of strings starting with the first string in the list. Let us say the list of strings is abc, def and ghi. I have to generate ordered combinations of the above list restricted to the ones starting with abc.