For the next edition of Scala with Cats I'm writing a section on implementing interpreters. In my research I ended up going fairly deep down the rabbit hole of optimizations, in which virtual machine dispatch is a major area. There are many different approaches to dispatch, and I struggled to relate them until I realized they were all variations on a basic structure that resulted from applying the principle of duality. Duality is one of the major themes of the book, so I was happy to make this discovery. However I think going deep into optimization is not appropriate for the book so I'm writing this up here instead.
ScalaBridge London is a community for learning Scala, for people who are underrepresented in technology. We last met in 2020, stopping when COVID made it impossible to continue. I want to restart ScalaBridge London. Here's the plan. If you'd like to take part, please signup.
I'm rewriting my books to include new material and target Scala 3. I'm opening sponsors so you can encourage me to finish faster.
Function programming is based1; that is, based on principles that allow a systematic and repeatable process for creating software. In this post I'm going illustrate this process with an example of summing the elements of a list, inspired by this conversation. We'll mostly be looking at algebraic data types and structural recursion (which often uses pattern matching, but is not synonymous with it).
For me, a working functional programmer, this process is one of the main advantages of FP. It means I can spend my mental cycles on understanding the problem, knowing that once I have done so the implementation follows in a straightforward way. The inverse also holds: if someone uses these principles to write code I can easily work out what problem it solves.
In this article I'm going to go through the process of improving some code. I'm mentoring a new developer who is applying for their first job. They were asked to complete some tasks on Codility as the first step of the interview process. To get used to the platform they did the first example task, and I advised them on some changes. I'm writing up here the progression from their code to (what I think is) better code. (Since this is the example task, not a task used to assess applicants, I think this is ok to publically post.)