rjberry

FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large established company and one of my main jobs is making systems work at large scale. But that's not what you do when starting a company. If you make it you can sort out those issues later.

Comment · 12 years ago

Not sure how that's relevant.

Anyway it's a logical fallacy "appeal to popularity".

Comment · 12 years ago

I worry that we're gradually moving towards a society that sees privacy as neither a right nor something desirable to an innocent individual.

Comment · 12 years ago

PHP is pretty popular ...

Comment · 12 years ago

Or you could use a library explicitly designed with these considerations in mind, that offers the same powerful, familiar combinators, with resource safety and speed. e.g.,

Machines in Haskell: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/machines

Scalaz Stream in Scala: https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz-stream

I've no doubt an equivalent exists for Clojure, too, although I'm not familiar enough with the language to point you in the right direction.

One of the most amazing things about writing the IO parts of your program using libraries like these is how easy they become to test. You don't have to do any dependency injection nonsense, as your combinators work the same regardless of whether they're actually connected to a network socket, a file, or whether they're just consuming a data structure you've constructed in your program. So writing unit tests is basically the same as testing any pure function - you just feed a fixture in and test that what comes out is what you expect.

I found this really useful when writing a football goal push notifications service for a newspaper I work for. I realised that what the service was essentially doing was consuming an event stream from one service, converting it into a different kind of stream, and then sinking it into our service that actually sent the notification to APNS & Google. The program and its tests ended up being much more succinct than what I would normally write, and the whole thing was fun, and took hardly any time.

I would say that is the right tool for the job.

Comment · 12 years ago

If we assume the operations we're talking about take time linear in proportion to the list, you've just gone from a * n time to b * n time, where b > a. Both of these are still O(n) in Big O notation, which drops constants, because constants unless they're very large or n is extremely large, tend to have relatively little effect on the running time of an algorithm.

Choosing to write more verbose, difficult to decipher, difficult to maintain code, under the claim that it will perform better, is not a good thing: "premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

In practice, if this becomes an issue (which you find out through benchmarking once you know there is a perf issue), most modern languages offer an easy way to swap out your data-structure for a lazily evaluated one, which would then perform the operations in one pass. Languages like Haskell or Clojure are lazy to begin with, so do this by default.

Comment · 12 years ago

Not that it particularly matters whether we're talking about C++, as it's rather tangential, the original essay by Richard P. Gabriel that coined the term "Worse is Better" talks about C++ (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html):

  The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

In his later essay on the same topic (http://dreamsongs.com/Files/IsWorseReallyBetter.pdf) he again talks about C++:

   In the computer world, the example of interest to JOOP readers is C++. Many would concede that languages like Smalltalk, Eiffel, and CLOS are vastly “better" in some sense than C++, but, because of its worse-is-better characteristics, the fortunes of object-oriented programming probably lie with C++.

Simplicity is more often simplicity of implementation than interface. Anyone who's worked with the C standard library knows that it's anything but simple. There's a lot of incidental complexity that is due to design inconsistencies. The complex parts of a language like Haskell are the bits where the ideas themselves are complicated, but the power you get for overcoming that initial learning curve is very great.

Comment · 12 years ago

Sure ... but if a loop is effectively doing a map, a filter, and a bunch of other operations all at once? It's a lot quicker to figure out what's going on if it's been written with combinators (once you're familiar with them) than if it's the vanilla loop.

Comment · 12 years ago

Paul explains fairly well why he thinks C++ is a good example of "worse is better", including quotes from the language designer to that effect.

I think when you get to more complicated (or at least alien) abstractions like the I/O Monad, it's not about whether it's practical to build software with it. It's perfectly practical - I know people working at big investment banks writing large scale software in Haskell, and they don't have any issue with it. What it comes down to is whether the people you work with will understand or want to invest the amount of time required to learn those abstractions. If you're working with very talented programmers, that might be yes. With the majority of programmers it is probably no.

But we're not talking about the I/O Monad. We're talking about generics, which are not difficult to understand, and that Go lacks them is a shame, as it means that whole layers of abstraction are not available to the programmer, so they end up having to spend more time writing boilerplate.

Comment · 12 years ago

It's not really a different approach. You had to write a lot of vanilla loops in C, too.