CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 sa...

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...

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 th...

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...

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, Vlin...

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...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. The surprising thing about rust is how memory management works.  Rust has the concepts of moves and borrowing.  If you have heard about Rust, you may have heard people talking about the borrow checker and trying to make it happy. In this interview, Jim Blandy walks us through what these concepts mean and how they work.  We also talk about how to avoid...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. At Strange loop 2017, a wandered into a talk where I saw some code that deeply surprised me. The code could have been python if you squinted, passing dictionaries around, no type annotations anywhere. Yet key look up in the dictionary was validated at compile time. It was a compile time error to access elements that didn't exist. Also the dictionary w...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. I don't know a lot about micro services.  Like how to design them and what the various caveats and anti-patterns are.  I'm currently working on a project that involves decomposing a monolithic application into separate parts, integrated together using Kafka and http.   Today I talk to coauthor of upcoming book, Reactive Systems Architecture : Designin...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions.  Rust, the programming language, seems to be really trendy these days.  Trendy to me means shows up a lot on hacker news.  Rust is really interesting language though, and I think the growing popularity is deserved.   Today I talk with Jim Blandy, one of the authors of Programming Rust.  We talk about w hat problems rust is trying to solve, t he unique...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Today's interview is with Steven Proctor, the host of the functional geekery podcast.  We talk about distributed programming in general and specifically how erlang supports distributed computing.  We also talk about things he's learned about functional programming and applying FP principles to various non FP contexts.   Contact Proctor: Functional Gee...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Purescript is a functional programming language that compiles to javascript.  It is a strict haskell dialect that can run anywhere that javascript does. Justin Woo is a self described Purescript evangelist and enthusiast. We talk about purescript vs elm and working with expressive type systems.  Justin also had some great metaphors about phantom types...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Today's interview is with John A De Goes. We talk about performance problems with monad transformer on the jvm, various flavours of IO monads and reasoning about polymorphic type signatures.  On the lighter side of things, we discuss how to write technical articles well, flame wars and Zee vs Zed pronunciation.     Show Notes: John's Website and Twitt...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. In simple terms, a total function is a function that produces a well defined output for all possible inputs.  A total program is a program composed of only total functions.   A non-total, or partial function, would be a function that can fail given certain inputs.  Such as taking the head of a list, which can fail if giving an empty list and is theref...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. Edwin Brady is the creator of the Idris programming language and Author of the book Type-Driven Development with Idris and a computer science lecturer.  The book, the language and Edwin himself all seem to be chock full of ideas for improving the way computer programming is done, by applying ideas from programming language theory.   In this interview,...

Tech Talks are in-depth technical discussions. In object oriented languages, modeling a complex problem domain is a well understood process.  Books like Domain Driven Design contain techniques for breaking down a problem domain and earlier books like the gang of four book catalogue design patterns for modeling these domains in an object oriented way. In today's interview Debashish Ghosh explains h...