Functional Classes in Clojure

My previous blog seemed only to continue the confusion regarding classes in Functional Programming. Indeed, many people got quite irate. So perhaps a bit of code will help. Trigger Warning: Object Oriented Terminology. Dynamically Typed Language. Mixed Metaphors. Distracting Animations. To all the adherents of the Statically...

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Functional Classes

I recently tweeted the following: Should you subdivide a functional program into classes the way you would an object oriented program?Yes. You should. Because the rules don’t change just because you’ve chosen to use immutable data structures.— Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin) January 17, 2023 This led to a bevy of interesting responses about...

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Space War

For the last month I've been spending a lot of time working on Space War. I know, I know, I should have been working on Clean Code Episode 67: Legacy Code, and Euler 5, and Countest and Curmugeon 3. I should have been working on a blog, or a new book, or... But I couldn't let go of Space War. It kept calling me. The first time I wrote Space War...

Nov 2021

Functional Duplications

I broke out my old Space War game a few days ago and decided to make a few changes to speed the game up and make it more fun to play. In so doing I discovered a very interesting bug. One of the changes I made was to populate the initial space with a few random bases scattered here and there. This would allow the player some extra resources with...

Oct 2021

Roots

When I was 15 or so, my father would drive me, and my best friend, Tim Conrad, to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sales office each Saturday. This was a 30 min drive. My father would drop us off in the morning and pick us up in the late afternoon. He spend two hours in his car each Saturday hauling us around. Thanks Dad! Tim and...

Sep 2021

More On Types

Recently I wrote a cute little program for doing Turtle Graphics. For those of you who don't know, turtle graphics were originally added to the LOGO language by Seymour Papert in the late 1960s. He built a robot that he called a "turtle" that could hold a pen. The robot had wheels and could move forwards and backwards, and could rotate left and right....

Jun 2021

On Types

I wrote my first program in 1964. The name of the program was: Mr Patternson's Computerized Gate, and it was implemented on a little plastic computer named DIGICOMP-I, which was a cute little three bit finite state machine with 6 AND gates. The first electronic computer I ever wrote a program for was an ECP-18 in 1966. This was a 15 bit wide machine...

Jun 2021

if-else-switch

A few days ago someone tweeted a question asking which of the following PHP snippets was better than the others, or whether there might be an even better approach. I tweeted my answer in the following cryptic paragraph. Place the if/else cases in a factory object that creates a polymorphic object for each variant. Create the factory...

Mar 2021

Pairing Guidelines

Everybody pairs from time to time. It is a rare programmer who has not sat down with another programmer to look something over or help find a bug. Deep problems, that require much heavy thinking, do not often lend themselves to pairing. The interaction between the programmers tends to disrupt the necessary concentration. On the other hand, it...

Jan 2021

Solid Relevance

Recently I received a letter from someone with a concern. It went like this: For years the knowledge of the SOLID principle has been a standard part of our recruiting procedure. Candidates were expected to have a good working knowledge of these principles. Lately, however, one of our managers, who doesn’t code much anymore, has questioned...

Oct 2020