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 […]

Elixir Native Interoperability – Ports vs. NIFs

Lately I’ve been working on a personal project of creating a wireless sensor network across my home. Elixir is a perfect fit for this project, but I quickly hit a road block: serial device access. While there are Erlang serial libraries that I could use, I wasn’t ultimately comfortable doing so, due to many forks […]

More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 2

In part 1 of this post I claimed it’s easy to test-drive our way into a poor design. We looked at some techniques for using types with TDD, but the examples were simple. Today I’ll walk through Kent Beck’s Money example showing where the design fails and how it can be improved with types.

More Typing, Less Testing: TDD with Static Types, Part 1

I learned test-driven development from Kent Beck’s book Test-Driven Development By Example. It’s an excellent introduction that whets the appetite for one of my other favorites, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. Both of these books have a blind spot, though: they are completely silent about how modern static […]

Haskell SDL Bindings on Windows

I recently wanted to get the Haskell SDK bindings running on windows. It was a bit trickier than I thought it would be — mostly due to a terrible macro SDL used to redefine the main() function. I used the SDL 1.2 bindings as they’re a little more mature than the SDL 2 bindings, which […]

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Functional Programming