Coder Radio Video

Mike and Wes debate the merits, and aesthetics, of Clojure in this week's rowdy language check-in.

Plus why everyone's talking about the sensitivty conjecture, speedy TLS with rust, and more!

Links:

• Feedback: Which Language To Use And Why? — There are so many languages out there, and I just don’t understand when or why you would want to use a language over another.
• Mathematician Solves Computer Science Conjecture in Two Pages | Quanta Magazine — This “sensitivity” conjecture has stumped many of the most prominent computer scientists over the years, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.
• ELI5: The Sensitivity Conjecture has been solved. What is it about? — Think of it like a Buzzfeed quiz. You answer a bunch of multiple-choice input questions about seemingly random topics ('What's your favourite breakfast cereal?', 'What's your favourite classic movie?', 'What did you want to be when you grew up?', and so on), and you get a response back at the end: usually which Hogwarts house you belong in.
• Sensitivity Conjecture resolved — Paul Erdös famously spoke of a book, maintained by God, in which was written the simplest, most beautiful proof of each theorem. The highest compliment Erdös could give a proof was that it “came straight from the book.” In this case, I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this.
• arXiv: Induced subgraphs of hypercubes and a proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture
• GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions — There's a debate over free speech taking place after Microsoft-owned GitHub "restricted" the account of a developer based in the Crimea region of Ukraine, who used the service to host his website and gaming software. 

Mike rekindles his youthful love affair with Emacs and we debate what makes a "10x engineer".

Plus the latest Play store revolt and some of your feedback.

Links:

• Feedback on Coder Radio 366 — As a C++ developer working on a large, primarily OO codebase, I’ve been writing ever more C++ as “just a pipeline of data transformations.” As you guys mentioned, you can get a lot of benefit even in an OO situation from wrapping a functional “core” up in an object “package.”
• Functional Core, Imperative Shell — In this screencast we look at one method for crossing this divide. We review a Twitter client whose core is functional: managing tweets, syncing timelines to incoming Twitter API data, remembering cursor positions within the tweet list, and rendering tweets to text for display. This functional core is surrounded by a shell of imperative code: it manipulates stdin, stdout, the database, and the network, all based on values produced by the functional core.

It’s a Coder Radio special as Mike and Wes dive into functional programming in the real world and share their tips for applying FP techniques in any language.

Links:

• Porting Redis to WebAssembly with Clang/WASI — In this post, we share our experience of porting an existing open-source software package — the data structure server Redis — to WebAssembly. While this is not the first time that Redis has been ported to Wasm (see this port by Sergey Rublev), it is the first time to our knowledge that the obtained port can be run deterministically.
• Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald — It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.
• The Value of Values with Rich Hickey — In this keynote speech from JaxConf 2012, Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and founder of Datomic gives an awesome analysis of the changing way we think about values.
• Clojure Made Simple by Rich Hickey — In the seven years following its initial release, Clojure has become a popular alternative language on the JVM, seeing production use at financial firms, major retailers, analytics companies, and startups large and small. It has done so while remaining decidedly alternative—eschewing object orientation for functional programming, C-derived syntax for code-as-data, static typing for dynamic typing, REPL-driven development, and so on. Underpinning these differences is a commitment to the principle that we should be building our systems out of fundamentally simpler materials. This session looks at what makes Clojure different and why.
• Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure by Rich Hickey
• sparklemotion/mechanize — Mechanize is a ruby library that makes automated web interaction easy.
• How to write idempotent Bash scripts — It happens a lot, you write a bash script and half way it exits due an error. You fix the error in your system and run the script again. But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they were already applied to your system. To build resilient systems you need to write software that is idempotent.

Wes turns back the clock and explores the message passing mania of writing Objective-C without a Mac, and we wax-poetic about programming language history.

Plus Mike gets real about the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and our take on the new MacBook keyboard leak.

Links:

• Apple is reportedly giving up on its controversial MacBook keyboard - The Verge — Apple is planning to ditch the controversial butterfly keyboard used in its MacBooks since 2015, according to a new report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. 9to5Mac notes that Apple will reportedly move to a new scissor-switch design, which will use glass fiber to reinforce its keys. According to Kuo’s report, the first laptop to get the new keyboard will be a new MacBook Air model due out this year, followed by a new MacBook Pro in 2020.
• Objective-C - History - Wikipedia — After acquiring NeXT in 1996, Apple Computer used OpenStep in its then-new operating system, Mac OS X. This included Objective-C, NeXT's Objective-C-based developer tool, Project Builder, and its interface design tool, Interface Builder, both now merged into one application, Xcode. Most of Apple's current Cocoa API is based on OpenStep interface objects and is the most significant Objective-C environment being used for active development.
• A Short History of Objective-C — While most programmers discovered Objective-C only during the iPhone app revolution, Objective-C has been around for over 30 years. Objective-C has been the foundation of Apple’s desktop operating system, Mac OS X, since its debut in 2001, and was also the basis for NEXTSTEP — OS X’s immediate ancestor — created by Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer Inc. However, Objective-C was created neither by Apple nor NeXT. Its origin was a small Connecticut startup in the early 1980s called Stepstone.
• GNUstep — GNUstep is a mature Framework, suited both for advanced GUI desktop applications as well as server applications. The framework closely follows Apple's Cocoa (formerly NeXT's OpenStep) APIs but is portable to a variety of platforms and architectures.

For a long time, GCC was the only compiler that worked with GNUstep. Unfortunately, the GCC team has not invested much effort in Objective-C in the last few years and it currently lags behind Apple's version by a significant amount.

Mike and Wes burrow into the concurrent world of Go and debate where it makes sense and where it may not.

Plus gradual typing for Ruby, a new solution for Python packaging, and the real story behind Jony Ive's exit.

Links:

• Goroutines - Concurrency in Golang — Goroutines are functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods. Goroutines can be thought of as light weight threads. The cost of creating a Goroutine is tiny when compared to a thread.
• Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP? — One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go's concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects.
• Jony Ive ‘dispirited’ by Tim Cook’s lack of interest in product design — To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations.
• CSP Paper
• A Tour of Go — These example programs demonstrate different aspects of Go. The programs in the tour are meant to be starting points for your own experimentation.

We take on the issues of burnout, work communication culture, and keeping everything in balance.

Plus Wes asks 'Why Not Kotlin' and breaks down where it fits in his toolbox.

Links:

• Kotlin overview — Kotlin is an open-source, statically-typed programming language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming. Kotlin provides similar syntax and concepts from other languages, including C#, Java, and Scala, among many others. Kotlin does not aim to be unique—instead, it draws inspiration from decades of language development. It exists in variants that target the JVM (Kotlin/JVM), JavaScript (Kotlin/JS), and native code (Kotlin/Native).
• Kotlin/Native — Kotlin/Native is a technology for compiling Kotlin code to native binaries, which can run without a virtual machine. It is an LLVM based backend for the Kotlin compiler and native implementation of the Kotlin standard library.

It's a Coder three-way as Chris checks-in with an eGPU update, and Mike shares his adventures with ReasonML.

Plus the state of linux application packaging, and Chris' ultimate mobile workflow.

Links:

• Mantiz Venus MZ-02 External Graphic Enclosure — Connects Full High Full Length 120" Width 2.5 PCIE Desktop Power GPU to computer WITH an Intel Certified Thunderbolt 3 port.
• Reason Homepage — Reason lets you write simple, fast and quality type safe code while leveraging both the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems.

Most data structures in most languages are about "this and that". A variant allows us to express "this or that".

Apple is shaking up the foundations of UI development with SwiftUI and raising developer eyebrows with a new default shell on MacOS.

Plus feedback with a FOSS dilemma and an update on our 7 languages challenge.

Links:

• Feedback: Lance’s FOSS Quandary — I was working on an open source project for school that we (4 members) submitted. Myself and another did 98% of the work the others contributed to the documentation (outside of the codebase). Class is over now for many months and nobody has touched the code but one other member and I wish to keep it going.
• Feedback: Developer, have money for a new Mac Pro? Buy these instead. — The recently unveiled Mac Pro is no doubt a gorgeous machine, engineered for a very particular group of people. While it will likely be a great machine for those who live and breathe within Finalcut and work with ProRes files, it’s overkill for a good developer machine.
• Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' — "zsh is highly compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) and mostly compatible with bash, with some differences," Apple explained in a support document posted on Monday in conjunction with the announcement of macOS Catalina, which ships this fall.

We react to Apple's big news at WWDC, check in with Mike's explorations of Elixir, and talk some TypeScript.

Plus Mike's battles with fan noise, and why he's doubling down on the eGPU lifestyle.

Links:

• Thelio Fan Noise Hack - Mike's Blog — I’ve had a System 76 Thelio for a little over four months now and a consistent issue that I’ve been experiencing is persistent fan noise even when the machine is idle.
• Advent of Code 2015
• Elixir — Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Wes is back and Mike's got a few surprises in store, including a new view on Electron, a hot take on titles, and a programming challenge for the both of them.

Plus when it's okay to lie to the compiler, what GitHub's Sponsors program means for open source, and your feedback.

Links:

• Coder Radio 343: Say My Functional Name — Mike breaks down the drama around nullable reference types in C# 8.0, and we debate what it means for the future of the language.