"New" Purely Functional Data Structures
This StackOverflow post covers “new” purely functional data structures created since Okasaki’s book “Purely Functional Data Structures” published in 1998.
“The Essence of Functional Programming” Part 1: The Identity Monad
This is the first of a new series of posts that will take papers that I read and will explain them and attempt to make them more concrete (and less theoretical) by showing real world examples using more industry-standard languages. These papers will be tagged with theory-in-practice. For more information on the “Theory in Practice” series, read the introductory post.
Today’s paper is “The essence of functional programming” by Philip Wadler. This paper is widely known as the paper which popularized monads, and introduces them in a relatively elementary context with a focus on practical programming use.
This is part 1 of a multi-part series. In order to allow the information to soak in and to not consume too much of your time, I’ve decided to split this into multiple parts which I will publish over the coming weeks. These will all be tagged with essence-of-functional-programming.
Part 1 will cover the inspiration for monads as well as introduce the trivial monad.
Prior knowledge required: Basic programming experience with basic experience in functional programming (in any language, whether it be Ruby, Python, C, etc.). The examples will be given in Haskell and Scala.
Theory in Practice
I’m starting a series of blog posts, published weekly, called “Theory in Practice.” These will take papers I read from the world of academia and attempt to reiterate them in simpler, more practical terms. One way I will do this is to take the examples, often in Haskell, and rewrite them in a more practical language, such as Scala. I’ll also add more real world applications, if needed.
Since my interests are currently in the world of programming languages and functional programming, I will start this series with a set of foundational papers in this subject area.
My goal with this series is to open the world of academic papers to a more general audience, as I’ve found that reading these papers has helped me in my day-to-day work greatly, and I hope that my blog posts will have a similar effect on others.
The first part the series will be on “The essence of functional programming” by Philip Wadler, and will be published this week.
Welcome to Ruby. We Have Many Rubies.
Although I consider myself (and I’m proud to be) a polyglot, most of my open source code is Ruby. I’ve been a Rubyist for almost 5 years now and it is still my language of choice for starting projects. Professionally, I’ve begun to use Python in the work-place, and in the process of learning Python I’ve had a hard time understanding the various Python implementations. Additionally, I know friends coming to Ruby who have trouble understanding the reasoning behind all the different Ruby implementations.
As such, I’m going to give a brief overview of the major Rubies available, their purpose, their development status, and my opinion of them. I’ll cover Matz’s Ruby (MRI or CRuby), Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE), JRuby, Rubinius (rbx), MacRuby, IronRuby, and MagLev.
The world of Rubies is unlike other languages, such as Python, where I would guess 95%+ use CPython exclusively. It is not uncommon for a single Ruby developer to use Rubinius at home, JRuby for production deployment, and MacRuby for desktop development.
CloudFormation: The Big Picture
Amazon announced CloudFormation to the public yesterday, and while the general opinion I could glean from various sources shows that people are excited about this new technology, many are still unsure what it is and how it fits into their current cloud workflow. I feel as though I have a firm grasp on CloudFormation and will attempt to answer some questions here.
Note: I’m definitely not a representative of Amazon in any way, and anything here is simply my educated opinion on the matter.
Flexible Local AWS Credentials Management
The Amazon Web Services(AWS) command line tools require certain environmental variables to be set up, such as EC2_HOME for EC2 and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and so on. Most people throw this in their bashrc file and call it good, but this quickly becomes inflexible if you have to manage more and more accounts.
For example, I happen to manage 4 separate AWS accounts (my personal account and 3 other projects).
This post outlines how I manage my credentials in a DRY (Don’t-Repeat-Yourself) and flexible way, such that I could easily add more credentials in the future if I needed to.
Let’s Get Back to Business
Five years ago, and for about two years after that, I was an avid blogger. I maintained a personal blog that focused on PHP (specifically the Zend Framework) and a year later I launched a successful blog on Erlang, known as spawn_link. Both blogs had a readership of over 500 people, which, while not trying to brag, I was proud of.
Though both blogs brought multiple serious job offers, it was my personal blog which got me my first two jobs in the tech industry (note that I was only 17 when I started blogging!). My first job was at Zend as a contractor doing screencasts for the Zend Framework, and my second job, and still my current employer, was with Citrusbyte, a modern web development shop (which introduced me to the Ruby programming language).
Both jobs kept me busy, super busy, and the result was that I stopped blogging!
The past few years I’ve worked with some extremely smart people, had some unbelievable experiences, and have grown — in many ways — at a rapid speed. There is still so much out there I want to do and things to learn, but I think my experiences the past few years and ongoing deserve to be put down to “ink” for others to gain from.
And that’s my goal with this blog: Let’s get back to business, the business of giving back for everything that I’ve gained.
