CoRecursive: Coding Stories

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 Twitter Descriptive Variable Names: A Code Smell Data Structures Are Antithetical to Functional Programming A Modern Architecture for FP

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 therefore non-total. Total programming can be done in any language, however many languages make this easier. Some, going so far as to require proof of totality. In this interview Andre Videla discusses how the swift program language encourages programming in a total style. He also discusses his love of Idris, proof assistants and how his research into haskell, idris and dependant types have made him a better swift programmer. Links: Total Programming In Swift

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, we discuss dependent types, type holes, interactive and type-driven development, theorem provers, Curry–Howard correspondence, dependant haskell, total functional programming, British vs American spelling and much more. Links: The Book Idris Lectures at OPLSS Idris Language Site

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 how to model a complex problem domain in a functional paradigm. His solution focuses on modelling the behaviour of the software system rather than nouns it will contain. He also focuses on an algebraic approach to api design and discusses how abstract algebra provides tools for building better software. Episode Page Episode Transcript "I first come up with what I call the algebra of the behaviors. The algebra of the behaviors refers to the basic contract, which the behavior is supposed to support, which the behavior is supposed to honor. So that's the algebra." -Debashish Ghosh Links: Debashish's Book