Unit Testing Phoenix Controllers with Mox

As the ecosystem for Elixir matures more and more, there are some libraries that seem particularly promising to me. One of them is Mox, a simple but powerful library for implementing mocks for predefined behaviours (note the British spelling!).

An Introduction to Property-Based Testing with JavaScript

Property-based testing is a powerful technique that’s been widely and successfully applied to functional-style codebases for a long time. As functional programming continues to get more and more popular among JavaScript developers, the value of this style of testing is becoming more obvious to a wider audience.

A Simpler Case for Functional Programming & “Elegant” Code

A lot has been written about the benefits of functional programming, but little of it is accessible to a newcomer. Some of the benefits are easy to understand from an inexperienced perspective (e.g. “it makes concurrency easier”), but others are pretty nebulous. Chief amongst the inscrutable properties of functional programming is its “elegance.” It isn’t […]

Pure Computed Properties in Ember

Ember.js has a great way of managing state on objects: computed properties. A computed property is basically a cached function call. If Ember idioms are properly followed, computed properties are pure functions.

Using Decorators to Declaratively Extend Functions

The decorator pattern gained fame in the object-oriented world after being featured in the classic 1994 Gang of Four book, Design Patterns. Since then, it’s been used extensively in traditional object-oriented programming as an alternative to inheritance. What’s really going on behind the scenes though, is composition, which means decorators are also great for cleaning […]

Building Better Board Games with Clojure and Gorilla REPL

A while back, my six-year-old daughter and I were on one of our regular daddy-daughter date nights when we decided to create a board game. We sat at a restaurant table with paper, crayons, and a small collection of Dungeons and Dragons trinkets. To my surprise, we built a fun little game that my daughter […]

4 Tips for Thinking Functionally

I’ve written before about why I prefer a functional programming paradigm to an object-oriented one, but it’s taken a long time to get there. I dabbled on and off for half a decade before the core ideas behind Clojure and Haskell really sank in and I could write code in my head without having to […]

TDD in a REPL

REPLs (Read-Eval-Print-Loops) are often billed as a great place to experiment and learn a language or a framework. They provide a very tight feedback loop. However, it can be difficult or time-consuming to extract the knowledge gained from a REPL and include it in your source code. I’ve hit the up arrow many times in […]

Four Reasons to Use Maps Instead of Classes

I started my career back when Object-Oriented Programming was first becoming a dominant methodology, and boy, was OOP going to change the world. Encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism—these tools promised to save the righteous from complexity, guarantee reusability, and decouple all the things! So when I recently starting developing in Clojure, the suggestion to “just use maps to […]

RSchema-Hamster: Schemas for Shaping Immutable Data

RSchema-Hamster is a Ruby gem that lets you use Hamster’s persistent data structures to define and validate the shape of your data via RSchema. What for? In order to clarify my designs, reduce mistakes, and leave code easier to change than when I found it, I: Strive to program with immutable data Learn to apply […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

Functional Programming