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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LinQ is often understood in terms of introducing a Domain Specific Language to work with data to C# and .Net in general. The fact is:it is not, and there is a considerable difference between LinQ syntax nature and a DSL. The problem is that DSL definition is blur enough to take anything interesting or cool under it!
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A great discussion I had with Don Syme at QCon SF. Don is one of the heroes to thank for .Net generics and he is a major contributor to F# design, Thanks Don!
http://www.infoq.com/interviews/F-Sharp-Don-Syme
Erik Meijer talks about less known LINQ features, like meta programming, about the differences between functional languages and OO ones, asynchronous computation, and others.
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For those that didn’t happen to be there, here is a link to my tinny presentation I did in VTDays last year. There is a huge room for improvement, yet funny :)
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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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Having worked with several Object-Relational mapping frameworks in the last few years, I got to a point where I couldn’t justify their complexity in my project. We often talk about the mismatch between the database and the object worlds, and that is where ORMs are often stated and referenced for “bridging the gap”!
Well I prefer to call it lifting the gap, or highering the gap, to have it now between DAOs and the rest of the code than having it between database and code.But I wouldn’t call this in any way reducing the gap.
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This is an interview I did at QCon with Ted Neward. Talking to Ted was very interesting even though arguing with him turned to be not easy at all :)
