Personally, just a "developer" without X in front of it, currently working with Scala. I blogged, gave talks on conferences and meetups , wrote "Things you need to know about JVM (that matter in Scala)" , co-created Chimney and created Hearth . I enjoy learning new things, especially more abstract like mathematics or algorithmics. If you want to know about new posts/talks/releases, follow me on Twitter , BlueSky or Mastodon !
In Scala, we generate quite a lot of code. A lot of that involves the compiler generating so-called type class instances. This mechanism is quite widespread, yet, very few people actually understand it. As a result, we, the community, settled for suboptimal practices, resulting in suboptimal performance and user experience.
Scala gives us a lot of power. We can easily model things with classes and OOP, we can pull in functional libraries and model everything with functions and values, we can implement a stateless monolith or a distributed system. And today we have a lot of books and tutorials that cover these topics: how to glue the code together to create a maintainable application with raw Futures/ Akka / Cats…
In many discussions about FP - especially about purely functional programming - there are talks about IO monad, IO type and so on. Its users argue that it is better than your standard imperative approach, that it helps reason, encapsulate side-effects and design more elegant programs. On the other hand, its opponents argue that programs are side-effectful by nature, so you would end up with…
So, we parsed an input - file, stream of characters or string - and we got nicely structured data in the form of a tree and/or an algebraic data type. What now?
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on your domain and business goals, and is quite often the core value of whatever you…
Algebraic data structures are invaluable in functional programming. With immutable data structures reasoning about the code is easy. Concurrency requires little effort as you don’t have to be worried about locking, mutexes and semaphores - nobody can change your data anyway. If you need to update something you can just create an updated copy and use it from now on. Except if you have a nested…
As soon as you start mentioning functional programming, monads pop out as something that you have to know. However, hardly anyone is good at explaining what a monad is. That is why we’ll try to get some intuition about it without defining it.
While algebras are something we (programmers) rely on in our everyday work, we don’t always use them knowingly. Functional programming, however, has a relatively high number of programmers who care about correctness and mathematical formalism, that leads to it. It is no surprise that it was FP that explored the idea that if you perceive your program as a pipeline of operations, you could provide…
If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work on can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean F-algebras and FP-concepts). So what are algebras and where can we meet some…
In FP we talk a lot about algebras, functions, and types. But types are sets, and functions are also sets. Algebras are types with operations that fulfill some conditions, which means they are also sets. So how low should we get if we want to start from the beginning? I would say we should start with finitary relations.