Átila on Code

Python is said to be a great prototyping language, I guess because types don’t have to be written down explicitly. I’ve never really gotten why someone would want to do that. Even after reading Code Complete I felt like it sounded like a good idea but also maybe… a waste of time?

I think I’ve just changed my mind. I’ve been struggling at work for a couple of weeks now with some new C code. It’s not just that it’s in C, there’s also some infra I’d never used before to work out as well. I felt like my head was clouded by implementation details that I had to consider at every step, so I tried something different: write it all, from scratch, in D.

Why D? Two reasons. First, it’s my favourite language. Second, the syntax is similar enough that a translation of the solution to C should be straightforward. One hour later I’d not only implemented everything I wanted, but now knew exactly what I had to do in C-land. Which, of course, will take much longer than an hour.

Still, I’m now wondering why I took so long to prototype my solution. It could’ve saved me two weeks of mostly unproductive work. The problem is too hard to solve in your current environment? Solve it somewhere else where it’s easy and translate later.

I found myself writing some code like this a week or two ago:

string testPath = ...;
func1(testPath, ...);
func2(testPath, ...);
...

I thought it was annoying that I had to keep repeating the same argument to every function call and started thinking about ways that I could automatically “thread” it. By just thinking that word I was taken to the world of Haskell and thought that the Reader monad would be great here. I even thought of implementing it in D, until I realised…  that’s just an immutable object! I don’t need a monad, just a struct or a class:

struct Foo {
    string testPath;
    func1(...) const;
    func2(...) const;
}

In most OOP languages I don’t need to pass anything when func1 or func2 are called, and they both implicitly have access to all the instance variables, which is exactly what I wanted to do anyway. In D I can even get something resembling Haskell do notation by writing the client code like this:

with(immutable Foo()) {
    func1(...);
    func2(...);
}

(as opposed to):

auto foo = immutable Foo();
foo.func1(...);
foo.func2(...);

I can’t believe it took me this long to realise it, but the Reader, Writer and State monads are just… objects. Reader is immutable, but I just showed how to get the same effect in D. It’d be similar in C++ with a const object, and the lack of the with keyword would make it more verbose, but in the end it’s very similar.

DConf 2016 happened last week in Berlin. As usual it was really cool to be able to attend and talk to so many great developers from around the world.

There weren’t really any earth-shattering announcements. The only thing that comes to mind is for-now anonymous donor offering the D foundation half a million dollars as long as there’s a plan to spend that money. That’s great news and I’m looking forward to hearing what that money will be spent on.

The talks were great, of course: they should be available soon enough so the details aren’t really needed. My favourite was probably Don’s talk on floating point numbers. I’ve read the IEEE spec and I still learned a lot.

And there was my lightning talk. I only found out about the schedule an hour before, which was the amount of time I had to write it. After a stress-filled hour passed, I learned that they didn’t have a VGA cable and had another cortisol spike as I tried to figure out some sort of solution. In the end I ssh’ed from a German Mac into my laptop, to sometimes hilarious consequences, with me ad-libbing with no brain-mouth filter for a few minutes. I need to see the video once it’s available to see how well I did…