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On Functional Programming Languages

As a programming-language adept I’ve been studying the ideas, concepts and theory of functional programming (FP) and FP-related languages for about 2 years now, still learning new things everyday.

Recently a ‘FP User Group’ was started by some people at Ghent University, called GhentFPG, and the first meeting took place last thursday, with great interest from students, university employees as well as people working in the industry. You can find some more info in the GhentFPG Google Group or in the wiki (where you can also find the slides of the presentations given during the first meeting).

Some days ago someone new to FP posted a message on the mailing list, asking which language he should study, among other things.

Since I think my reply might be of general interest (also outside GhentFPG), I decided to post a copy on this blog as well (note I did add some extra markup). Comments welcome!

Based on my experience (which is biased, obviously):

  • Functional Programming is not only a language-related thing. FP
    languages do enforce you to apply functional paradigms, but you can
    easily follow these paradigms in lots of other (more mainstream?)
    languages as well: it is easier to learn people a paradigm using a
    language they already know, rather than telling them FP is really cool
    and useful and interesting, but requires them to learn a new
    language/toolchain/… first.

    Not talking about Java or C++ or something similar here, rather Python
    and Ruby.

  • If you’re into Java/C#/…, Scala is a really good introduction to FP:
    it allows you to write OOP code just like you do already, but also
    provides you lots of FP-related features, and pushes you gently into the
    FP approach. The book “Programming in Scala” by Odersky et al. (the main
    author of Scala) is IMO a really good intro to both Scala as well as the
    FP concepts it provides, not only showing them but also explaining
    gently why they’re useful, and why they’re ‘better’ than the approaches
    you’re taking already.

    The Scala type system is rather interesting as well.

    It’s the gentle path, so you want ;-) Learning Scala before reading
    Real World Haskell‘ certainly helped me a lot to understand the latter.

  • Haskell is an incredibly interesting language because of the concepts
    it adopted and types it provides, but it does require an immediate mind
    switch when coming from a non-OOP world (I once spent about 2 hours to
    explain a Java-guy how classes and instances in Haskell relate to
    classes and instances in Java, it wasn’t obvious). “Real World Haskell”
    is certainly worth a read (and if you read “Programming in Scala” as
    well, you’ll notice lots of similarities).

    I for one can read Haskell code pretty easily and learned lots of
    CS/math things thanks to learning it, but I’m (still) unable to write
    non-trivial code (I need some good project to get my hands dirty I
    guess).

  • Erlang is really interesting from a (very specific) feature
    perspective: high-availability, distributed computing, the actor system
    and the OTP library on top of it,…

    It’s a rather ‘old’ language, but I kind of like it. Some people do
    complain about the syntax, but once you figured out ‘,’, ‘;’ and ‘.’ are
    used almost the same as they are in ‘human’ written language, everything
    becomes obvious :-)

    Do note though Erlang is not a normal general-purpose language. You can
    code +- everything you want using it, but it’s really targeted to
    distributed/high-available/network applications. You most likely won’t
    use it to solve mathematical problems or write a game. It’s really good
    at what it’s built for though.

    One final note: please don’t ever make the mistake I made. If you know
    Erlang, and take a look at Scala (which also has an actor library in the
    standard distribution, as well as the more advanced Akka-library), don’t
    judge Scala as being a competitor for Erlang, they’re both completely
    different languages targeting different applications. ‘Scala’ is not
    about ‘scalability’ as Erlang is (it’s a “Scalable Language”).

  • F# (and most likely OCaml as well, although I never used it though) is
    certainly worth a look as well. I only read 3/4th of a book on it, but
    it looks really promising and interesting.

  • There’s obviously all sorts of Lisp dialects. I have no opinion on
    them, never looked into any Lisp closely enough. I only wrote some
    Clojure (a Lisp-dialect for the JVM) code one day, but need to learn
    more about the Lisp-way of programming. Clojure seems to be interesting
    because of the deep integration of Software Transactional Memory (STM)
    in the language (yet another approach to concurrency ;-) ).

As for the IDE question: Vim and a decent terminal are all you need,
luckily none of the above languages require you to learn how to use a
toolchain which enforces you (or some magic IDE) to write 500 lines of
XML-based build ‘programs’ or other insanities.

My advice: pick some language, learn it, but make sure you don’t only
learn the language, but especially the concepts (type system,
higher-order stuff, list manipulation,…). Then pick some other
language and learn it as well (which will be easier since you got the
concepts already) and so on.

And read tons of papers available on the internet in between ;-) Even if
you don’t understand a paper completely, you’ll pick up some things
already, and re-reading it 2 weeks later helps a lot :-D

Just my .02,

Nicolas

Posted in Development, Technology.

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Book review: Python Testing – Beginner’s Guide

As mentioned before, some days ago I received a copy of a recent book from Packt Publishing titled “Python Testing – Beginner’s Guide” by Daniel Arbuckle. I read the whole book (it’s not huge, around 220 pages), and wrote a review, as requested by Packt.

The book targets people who know Python (it doesn’t contain a language introduction chapter or something alike, which would be rather pointless anyway), and want to start testing the code they write. Even though the author starts by explaining basic tools like doctests and the unittest framework contained in the Python standard library, it could be a useful read even if you used these tools before, e.g. when the Mock library is explained, or in the chapter on web application testing using Twill.

The text is easy to read, and contains both hands-on code examples, explanations as well as tasks for the reader and quiz questions. I did not audit all code for correctness (although in my opinion some more time should have been invested here before the book was publishing: some code samples contain errors, even invalid syntax (p45: “self.integrated_error +q= err * delta“), which is not what I expect in a book about code testing), nor all quizes. These could’ve used some more care as well, e.g. on p94 one can read

What is the unittest equivalent of this doctest?

>>> try:
...     int('123')
... except ValueError:
...     pass
... else:
...     print 'Expected exception was not raised'

I was puzzled by this, since as far as I could remember, int(’123′) works just fine, and I didn’t have a computer at hand to check. Checked now, and it works as I expected, so maybe I’m missing something here? The solution found in the back of the book is a literal unittest-port of the above doctest, and should fail, if I’m not mistaken:

>>> def test_exceptions(TestCase):
...     def test_ValueError(self):
...         self.assertRaises(ValueError, int, '123')

This example also shows one more negative point of the book, IMHO: the code samples don’t follow PEP-8 (or similar) capitalization, which makes code rather hard to read sometimes.

The solutions for the last quiz questions are missing as well, and accidently I did want to read those.

Don’t be mistaken though: these issues don’t reduce the overall value of the book, it’s certainly worth your time, as long as you keep in mind not to be too confused by the mistakes as shown above.

Topic overview

The book starts with a short overview of types of testing, including unit, integration and system testing, and why testing is worth the effort. This is a very short overview of 3 pages.

Starting from chapter 2, the doctest system is introduced. I think it’s an interesting approach to start with doctest instead of using unittest, which is modeled after the more ‘standard’ xUnit packages. Doctests are useful during specification writing as well, which is in most project the first stage, before any unittestable code is written. The chapter also introduces an overview of the doctest directives, which was useful to read.

In chapter 3 gives an example of the development of a small project, and all stages involved, including how doctests fit in every stage.

Maybe a sample of Sphinx and its doctest integration would have been a nice addition to one of the previous chapters, since the book introduced doctest as part of stand-alone text files, not as part of code docstrings (although it does talk about those as well). When writing documentation in plain text files, Sphinx is certainly the way to go, and its doctest plugin is a useful extra.

Starting in chapter 4, the Python ‘mocking‘ library is introduced. The chapter itself is a rather good introduction to mock-based testing, but I don’t think mocks should be used in doctests, which should be rather small, examplish snippets. Mock definitions don’t belong there, IMO. This chapter also shows some lack of pre-publishing reviews in a copy-paste error, in the block explaining how to install mocker on page 62, telling from now on Nose is ready to be used.

Chapter 5, which you can read here introduces the unittest framework, its assertion methods, fixtures and mocking integration.

In chapter 6 ‘nose‘ is introduced, a tool to find and run tests in a project. I use nose myself in almost every project, and it’s certainly a good choice. The chapter gives a pretty good overview of the useful features nose provides. It does contain a strange example of module-level setup and teardown methods, whilst IMHO subclassing TestCase would be more suited (and more portable).

Chapter 7 implements a complete project from specification to implementation and maintenance. Useful to read, but I think the chapter contains too much code, and it’s repeated too often.

Chapter 8 introduces web application testing using Twill, which I never used before (nor did I ever test a web application before). Useful to read, but Twill might be a strange choice, since there have been no releases since end 2007… Selenium might have been a better choice?

A large part of the chapter is dedicated to list all possible Twill commands as well, which I think is a waste of space, this can be easily found in the Twill language reference.

Chapter 9 introduces integration and system testing. Interesting to read, the diagram-drawing method used is certainly useful, but it also contains too much code listings.

Finally, chapter 10 gives a short overview of some other testing tools. First coverage.py is explained, which is certainly useful. Then integration of test execution with version control systems is explained. I think this is certainly useful, but not at this level of detail. Setting up a Subversion repository is not exactly what I expect here, especially not when non-anonymous, password-based authentication over svn:// is used (which is a method which should be avoided, AFAIK).
Finally, continuous integration using Buildbot is tackled. No comments here, although I tend to use Hudson myself ;-)

Final words

Is this book worth your time and money? If you’re into Python and you don’t have lots of experience with testing Python code, it certainly is. Even if you wrote tests using unittest or doctests before, you’ll most likely learn some new things, like using mocks.

I’m glad Packt gave me the opportunity to read and review the book. I’d advise them to put some more effort in pre-publishing reviews for future titles, but the overall quality of the non-code content was certainly OK, and I hope lots of readers will enjoy and learn from this book.

Posted in Technology.

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Book review: Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide

Recently a new book on software testing in Python projects was published by Packt Publishing, “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide”. I’ll read the book the coming weeks (it didn’t arrive yet) and publish a review later on.

If you’re into Python software development, you might want to take a look at the book webpage, or download a free chapter (PDF) about the standard Python unittest package for now.

Since I’m not a big fan of extensive/exaggerated unit testing and rather believe in functional/component tests, I’m looking forward to read the book and learn some new things. Looking forward to the web application testing chapter, among others.

Disclaimer: I was invited by Packt Publishing to review this book, and they provide a free copy.

Posted in Development.


Facebook goes XMPP?

MacBook:~ nicolas $ telnet chat.facebook.com 5222
Trying 69.63.176.191...
Connected to chat.facebook.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
<stream />
<?xml version="1.0"?><stream:stream id="F6DE2CB5" from="chat.facebook.com" xmlns="jabber:client" xmlns:stream="http://etherx.jabber.org/streams" xml:lang="en"><stream:error><invalid-namespace xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-streams"/></stream:error></stream:stream>

Connection closed by foreign host.

Jay!

Posted in Technology.


Scala tail recursion and decompiler adventures

I’ve been into Scala lately. More about it will follow later, but there’s something I found out which I really like.

Last couple of days I wrote some very basic Scala snippets, containing constructs which would be non-trivial or ‘unusual’ to write in Java, compile it to a class file, and then use a Java decompiler to figure out how the Scala compiler maps those constructs to JVM bytecodes.

There’s one thing which took my attention: looks like (basic) tail-recursive functions are optimized into while-loops! This only happens if the last call of a function is a call to itself (the most basic form of tail recursion), but it’s an interesting feature anyway… No more need to put socket accept handling in an infinite while loop :-)
Continued…

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Importing a Git tree into a Subversion repository

Recently I worked on some new project, and as always I created a local Git repository as a start. After working on it several days, creating lots of commits, I had to publish it into the central Subversion repository (which is one of the VCSs we got). I could have done this by creating a new folder in SVN and add the latest version of all files of the project to it, but that way all history would be gone, which I didn’t like.

Git has a feature to work with SVN repositories, git-svn, but that’s intended to check out existing code from SVN and work on it, not publishing an existing Git tree into a Subversion repository.

A first rather naive approach didn’t work out (as somewhat expected), but then I figured out how to achieve this anyway.
Continued…

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Microsoft to release Linux HyperV drivers as GPLv2

Looks like Microsoft releases the Linux drivers to enable a Linux kernel running as a guest in a Hyper-V hypervisor to run in ‘enlightened mode’, which sounds pretty much like Xen‘s PV drivers for Windows, providing better IO performance, under the GPLv2 (which is the same open-source license as the Linux kernel itself). Quoting the Hyper-V Architecture and Feature Overview:

Enlightened I/O is a specialized virtualization-aware implementation of high level communication protocols (such as SCSI) that utilize the VMBus directly, bypassing any device emulation layer. This makes the communication more efficient but requires an enlightened guest that is hypervisor and VMBus aware.

The drivers seem to be developed by Novell, so I guess the Boycott Novell guys will have some more coverage^Wrants soon :-P (Update: can’t find the reference on this anymore, so this might be a false statement, sorry. Thanks for pointing out RubenV)

Interesting times on the virtualization front… Although I for one do not plan to replace Xen, xVM or VirtualBox anytime soon.

Sources:

On a side note: Red Hat entered the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, which might show Linux is gaining more interest from enterprises and investors.

Posted in Linux, Technology.

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Re: Python recursion performance test

(This is a reply on a post by Ahmed Soliman on recursion performance in (C)Python, and CPython function call overhead in general. I started to write this as a comment on his post, but it turned out much longer, so sending it over here in the end.)

Hey,

As discussed before, this is not a fair comparison, since the non-recursive version is much ‘smarter’ than the recursive one: it calculates values and will never recalculates them, whilst the recursive version calculates everything over and over again.

Adding some simple memoization helps a lot. First, my testing code:
Continued…

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First Clojure experiments

Some weeks ago I attended JavaOne (a pretty neat conference, even for non-Java-heads like me) and got in touch with several non-Java languages running on the JVM (nothing really new next to Project Fortress, but I never got into most for real).

Since I wanted to learn some language not resembling any other I already know (even a little), I decided some hours ago to start digging into Clojure, which is a LISP dialect running on the JVM using STM (Software Transactional Memory) and created with concurrency in mind. Check the website for more information.
Continued…

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Joined the Twitter train

Created a Twitter profile today, let’s see what it brings.

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