CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Richard Whaling has an interesting perspective on software development. If you write software for the JVM or if you are interested in low level system programming, or even doing data heavy or network heavy IO programming then you will find this interview interesting.

We discuss how to build faster software in a modern fashion by using glibc and techniques from system programming. This means using raw pointers and manual memory management but from a modern language.

Richard also shares some perspectives on better utilizing the underlying operating system and how we can build better software by depending on services rather than libraries.

Links:

• Beej's Guide to C
• Beej's Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
• Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software Screencasts (Web Server from Scratch, Malloc from scratch, shell from scratch)
• Stevens & Rago Systems Programming books:
  • Advanced Programming UNIX Environment
  • Unix Network Programming - Sockets
  • UNIX Network programming - Interprocess Communication

A decade ago Jamis Buck was not loving his job. He was an important open source contributor. He worked for the hottest trendiest software company at the time, 37 signals, creator of ruby on rails. He was on top of the world but also he was burnt out.

Today Jamis talks about how he overcame burn out.

We discuss how his struggle lead him to write a book about generating mazes and another about building a ray tracer. His books are great fun, and all about recreational programming. You will learn to build things with a focus not on the latest trends in software development and not even a specific programming language.

The focus instead is on fun.

Which operating system is the best? Which programming language is the best? What text editor?

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Joyent says that is the wrong question. Languages, operating systems and communities have to make trade offs and they do that based on their values. So the right language is the one who's values align with you and your projects goals.

This simple idea carries a lot of weight and I think has the potential to lift up technical discussions to a higher level of discourse. You will find it to be a helpful frame next time you need to make a technical decision. Bryan is also pretty excited about how the values of the rust community align with his values for system software.

Also we cover Oberon, Clean and Simula 4, none of which I've never heard of and how IBM System/370 's Global Trace Facility doesn't hold a candle to Dtrace.

Webpage for this episode

Show Links:

• Software Values Slides
• The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System
• Microsoft should buy github
• All Bryan's Talks
• Slack Channel for Site

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

When it comes to type systems "I am, so far, only in the dependent types camp" - Daniel P. Friedman

You can write more correct software and even rigorous mathematical proofs. Prepare for some mind stretching.

Previous guests like Edwin Brady and Stephanie Weirich have discussed some of the exciting things a dependent type system can do Miles Sabin said dependent types are surely the future. This interview is to get us ready for the future.

Daniel P. Friedman is famous for his "Little" series of books. Little Schemer, Little prover, Little MLer and so on. These books are held in high regard.

Here is a quote from Doug Crockford: "Little Schemer teaches one thing, a thing that is very difficult to teach, a thing that every profession programmer should know, and it does it really well. These are lessons that stick with you." The latest one is the little typer and its about types. Specifically dependent types.

Dan's coauthor is David Thrane Christiansen, Idris contributor, and host of a podcast about type theory that is way over my head.

Together they are going to teach us how the programming skills we already have can be used to develop rigourus mathematical proofs.

Stay tuned to the end for my guide to working thru the book.

Originally published at CoRecursive here

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Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Evolving software under constrained resources is a challenge, and I think we kid ourselves when we don't admit this. Software that is providing value often grows in scope until it is a mess. Today I talk to Wade Waldron about how avoid this situation or recover from it.

Big ball of mud is the title of a paper presented at the 1997 Patterns Languages of Programs conference and I think it is super interesting.

The researchers went out into the field to see what architectures software in industry were following. Big Ball of mud is what they found, along with other 6 other patterns with names like "sweep it under the rug" and reconstruction, which is the throw it away and start again pattern.

Links:

• Big Ball Of Mud Paper
• Hexagonal Architecture
• Reactive Foundations Course
• Reactive Advanced Course

Check out other episodes like this Philip Wadler:

https://corecursive.com/021-gods-programming-language-with-philip-wadler/

This podcast originally published here :

https://corecursive.com/22-big-ball-of-mud-architecture-and-services-with-wade-waldron/

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Today I talk to Professor Philip Wadler, a very accomplished programming language researcher. Phil walks us through a principle that has guided his career. That principle is that typed lambda calculus is not invented but a discovery of a deep truth. It is something connected to the mathematical underpinning of the universe itself.

It follows from this that functional programming languages are therefore more correct or more deeply justified and fundamental than other languages. I am probably stating things in a stronger fashion than Phil is comfortable with, but I like fp, so I can be a little hyperbolic.

While explaining this principle, that has guided his career, Phil takes us through the history of computer science. We start with Turing and Alonzo Church. Eventually we get to what the movie Independence Day got wrong and what language a theoretical creator deity would program in.

Show notes:

• talk
• paper

Web page for this episode

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When Riccardo Terrell hit the concurrency limitations in a jvm application, he thought back to the haskell he learned in a university course and decided to rewrite the entire thing in haskell.  The immutability of the haskell solution made the concurrency bottleneck non-existent.  It is no surprise that years later, his book on concurrency in .net leans heavily on functional programming constructs and the functional features of F# and C#.

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

"Metrics and Dashboards can die in a fire and every software engineer should be on-call" - Charity Majors

Today's Interview is with Charity Majors. We talk about how to make it easier to debug production issues in today's world of complicated distributed systems. A warning, There is some explicit language in this interview.

I originally saw a talk by Charity where she said something like fuck your metrics and dashboards, you should test in production more. It was a pretty hyperbolic statement, but backed up with a lot of great insights. I think you'll find this interview similarly insightful.

Charity and her company are probably best known for popularizing the concept that observability in the key to being able to debug issues in production.

Also if you are a talented developer with functional programming skills, I've got a job offer for you. My employer Tenable is hiring. Tenable is a pretty great place to work. Here is a job link.

Show notes:

• Facebook Scuba
• Observability Talk
• the-engineer-manager-pendulum
• HoneyComb.io

Show Link

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

Today I talk to Vaughn Vernon about how Domain Driven Design can help with designing microservices. The guidelines that Vaughn has developed in his work on DDD can provide guidance for where service and consistency boundaries should be drawn. We also talk about the platform he is developing for applying these DDD concepts using the actor model, Vlingo.

Show Notes:

• Implementing DDD Book
• Vlingo Platform
• Vlingo Source

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.

The promise of functional programming is code that is easier to reason about, test and maintain. Referential transparency means there is no extra context to worry about, we can just focus on inputs and outputs. Examples of functional programming in the small are plentiful. Fibonacci is easy to write as a function but what about fp in the large?

Http4s is a web framework written in scala that takes a pure functional approach to building http services. Ross Baker is a contributor to http4s and he explains the benefits of this approach. We also touch on the benefits of working remotely, since he and I have both been doing it for some time.

Links:

• Http4s
• Presentation on Http4s

Today I talk with @rossabaker about http4s and the benefits of a pure functional approach to building http services