CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 CoRecursive On Twitter CoRecursive On Itunes

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

Vaughn Vernon, an expert on domain-driven design and creator of the Vlingo platform, dives deep into the interplay between domain-driven design and microservices. He shares insightful guidelines for defining service and consistency boundaries. The discussion explores the importance of bounded contexts and the challenges of data consistency. Vaughn highlights how Vlingo supports DDD principles with its reactive architecture, while inviting developers to collaborate on open-source projects, fostering a global community for innovation.

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

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 fighting with the borrow checker at all and why the conceptual model that Rust adopts, though it may seem unusual at first, is actually more representative of how computers work and therefore an easier programming model.

In this discussion, Stephanie Weirich, a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in dependent types, shares her insights on extending Haskell's type system. She illustrates how dependent types make type checking more powerful, allowing for compile-time validation of elements in heterogeneous dictionaries. Stephanie explains the applications of dependent types in creating safer programs, including parsing expressions. The conversation also touches on the experimental nature of Haskell and the evolution of its language features, offering a glimpse into future possibilities.

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 : Designing and Implementing an Entire Distributed System. If you want to learn some of the hows and whys of building a distributed system, I think you'll really enjoy this interview. The insights from this conversation are already helping me. Contact Jan Machacek is the CTO at Cake Solutions. Videos long lived micro services Book - Reactive System Architecture

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 what problems rust is trying to solve, the unique language features and type system of rust. It includes both algebraic data types, type classes, and generics. There is even a proposal somewhere for adding HKT. We also touch on why it is so hard to secure code. Jim works on Firefox and his insights into the difficulty of writing secure code are super interesting. Show notes Rust Programming Rust Book MESI protocol Constraint-based Verification of Parameterized Cache Coherence Protocols Formal Methods in System Design Rust Validation - 3d game demo - (not sure where this is, post in comments if you find it) integer overflow

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 Geekery Podcast @stevenproctor @fngeekery

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 and masking tape as well as avacados and testing. Contact Justin: twitter github website Show notes: Purescript purescript training videos My team at Tenable is hiring. We are a distributed team of scala developers working on static analysis of docker containers (among other things). We are a team of smart people, working fairly autonomously on interesting problems. We are one of many teams working on interesting problems at Tenable. I think its a great place to work. I am in Peterborough, in Canada, and our team has people working in the US, Ireland and the UK as well. Here is the job posting: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/586241797/ Tell them Adam sent you, or you can email me directly at work abell at tenable.com or use this link to apply.