Computation Abstraction: Going beyond programming language control syntax, or what we’ve missed from FP for so long in mainstream
For a long time, and due to the lack of main FP concepts in most mainstream languages, we missed opportunities to abstraction and code expressiveness and conciseness. With today’s democratization of FP, Computational Abstraction is what will enable us to be less dependent on specific programming language syntax offering; creating libraries of control structures and composition forms that help find concise and expresive solutions to enterprise programming challenges (null, lists treatment, error handling), capturing elegantly important business concepts in code, and programming at the right level of abstraction.For a long time, and due to the lack of main FP concepts in most mainstream languages, we missed opportunities to abstraction and code expressiveness and conciseness. With today’s democratization of FP, Computational Abstraction is what will enable us to be less dependent on specific programming language syntax offering; creating libraries of control structures and composition forms that help find concise and expresive solutions to enterprise programming challenges (null, lists treatment, error handling), capturing elegantly important business concepts in code, and programming at the right level of abstraction.
Slides: http://sadekdrobi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Computation-Abstraction666iiioii6jjjjjjhjj-5.pdf
Google wave: https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BPgcakhgiA
Code included here is over simplified for clarity, I hosted a better implementation code on CodePlex. These modifications change strictly nothing for the client code and are only an implementation detail. I use a continuation rather than a delay, and I chose to design a custom continuation class rather than using a delegate because of a type system limitations.
Most GUI frameworks, including Silverlight and WPF, are shipped with a fundamental problem: long use of the main thread causes the Window to blackout, and using different threads requires you to get your hands dirty with the Dispatcher stuff and freezable objects. Worse, you wont learn the necessity to do so until you get a surprise of “The calling thread cannot access this object because a different thread owns it.” exception when all what you were doing is to use available methods on an object that seemed you have access to, at lease it seemed until runtime! This post illustrates a solution based on Monads abstraction and LinQ syntax.
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Jim Webber from http://www.infoq.com/interviews/robinson-webber-rest 00:37:08:
We did put abstraction after abstraction onto our distributed system infrastructure and you know what: it hasn’t worked out that well for us. Some of the largest and most sophisticated distributed systems on the planet haven’t been all that large or sophisticated and then this kind of crappy protocol comes along that insists on being synchronous, and insists on being text-driven and it scales globally. That’s shocking and does not make sense to us as engineers. That’s the web paradox – it’s the rubbishest thing on the planet, but it scaled and for me that is what’s hit the reset button because I was totally up for XML-based protocols that do all sorts of funky stuff.
Those that follow my twitter @sadache , me @infoQ or my blog have certainly already noticed that I am quite interested in Scala on languages’ axis and in Domain Context Interaction DCI pattern on architecture axis. I always search new ways for delivering quality code which is modular and concise. Modularity offers the opportunity to think about the problem in parts, which is typical of the way brains work, whereas conciseness makes use of imaginary system (reading code blocks like images).
Recently, I’ve been working on a Web Api system where, thanks to support of @jeanlaurent http://morlhon.net/blog/, I used Scala applying DCI architecture in a real world project. This post is about reporting benefits of using this approach. Other posts will follow that will be more focused on the use of Scala and Functional Programming in that project. Code included is a bit simplified and parts of the system that are not of interest are omitted.
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James O. Coplien and Trygve Reenskaug have recently introduced a new architectural approach to OOP based on Data, Context and Interaction pattern. It should allow capturing user mental model in terms of behavioral requirements, something that classic OOP fails to do. The article, that triggered many reactions and critics, provides insights into DCI using concrete examples to show its advantages.
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In short, I do believe that Spring framework forced you for a long time to use a subset of Java, a subset of frameworks you use, and has been implicitly very intrusive on all the frameworks that support it. It constrains innovation and limit choices. And more!
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@QCon SF, I attended a presentation of Erik Meijer in which he talked about research projects he is involved in, including the Volta project. He talked about an interesting problem that is ignored when we talk about Ajax application and especially when we talk about solutions like GWT that make you feel home while programming for the web. In such an experience, and before splitting your application and deploying it on the web, you feel quite secured. Anyway, often, it is not so important to look for securing inner computer guts communication when there is no network involved. Evil shows up when it is time to go live, to the clouds. There you are not communicating through inner channels but rather through public Internet network.
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