Doesn’t that title just get the blood pumping? Proof verification has a reputation for being an inordinately academic subject. In fact, even within scholarly (otherwise known as “unrealistically intelligent“) circles, the automated verification of proofs is known mainly as a complex, ugly and difficult task often not worth the effort. This is a shame really, […]
Functional programming has a lot of weird and abstract concepts. Monads of course are the poster child for all that is strange and confusing in functional languages, but there are other examples. At first glance, it seems that the concept of an infinite list would be just as bizarre and incomprehensible as anything else in […]
I wrote a post some time ago introducing a software transactional memory (STM) framework for Scala based on implicit conversions. This framework had some nice features, like a very clean syntax coupled with compile-time verification of transactional semantics, but it really wasn’t ready for real-world use. There was one very serious skeleton in the closet […]
I know, the title seems a bit…bizarre. I don’t know about you, but when I think of Scala, I think of many of the same uses to which I apply Java. Scala is firmly entrenched in my mind as a static, mid-level language highly applicable to things like large-scale applications and non-trivial architectures, but […]
In one of Rich Hickey’s excellent presentations introducing Clojure, he mentions in passing that Scala “isn’t really a functional language”. He says that Java and Scala are both cut from the same mold, and because Scala doesn’t force immutability it really shouldn’t qualify. These viewpoint is something I’ve been hearing a lot of from various […]