Tools, tools, tools. And Lambda's

I like tools. I learning about them, learning to use them and simply discovering them.

So, my current topics of interest are an assortment of languages and a discipline. The discipline is "Functional programming" - that lead off to a couple of languages.

Lately, I have been learning Ruby. I like its pure "object-orientedness" and its conciseness and its ability to support functional programming - if you have the discipline. Lambda's intrigued me, but I felt that I wasn't getting the whole picture. Then I read about LINQ - a project based on my bread and butter language, C#. LINQ adds Language Integrated Query capabilities and set handling features, basically to C# itself. Well, how do they do this? OK, Lambda's. In C# 3.0. Well there's something I didn't know about, but I'm starting to see something important take shape.

From there I followed my nose and ended up looking at many neat things. I have tripped over a number of functional programming tools such as Haskell, OCaml and F#. Haskell looked good as presented in A Gentle Introduction to Haskell 98 - particularly since this tutorial gives a good feel for the functional programming model.

How'd I get to functional programming? I tripped over Lambdas in C# 3.0.

Of course, to whet one's whistle regarding functional programming see Introduction to Functional Programming, which is geared somewhat towards Python, but is not hampered by that. The examples are readily understandable and I could see them through to Ruby.

My head is spinning. It's great. Which way do I go? F# and a head first into FP. Oh wait, what about my continued explorations into Ruby and Rails? Oh, and then when do I get to C# 3.0....

Comments

Unit Testing - What to Test

This I wrote to answer a question that came up when we were discussing our software process and I was training developers on how to unit test. It seems a simple enough question, but I kept pondering it and delving deeper until I realized I needed to write this monograph. What unit tests should we write? How do we know what to test? Ideally, unit tests should cover every path through the code. It should be your chance to see every path through your code works as expected and as needed. If you are practicing Test Driven Development then it's implied everything gets a test. In the real world, you might not be allowed to test everything - for instance, if the testing suite ends up taking a week to run, then the world will have changed by the time it finishes and the test results will be obsolete. Unit testing at it's basic is testing an object, a method - the smallest unit of your code that it can test independently. It should test the inputs "goes into" an

Healthcare and Health Informatics Glossary

Here is a glossary of terms useful in Healthcare and Health Informatics ACO (Accountable Care Organization) MEDICARE’s outcomes-based contracting approach Arden Syntax an approach to specifying medical knowledge and clinical decision support rules in a form that is independent of any EHR and thus sharable across hospitals ARRA (American Recovery and Reconstruction Act) the Obama administration’s 2009 economic stimulus bill Blue Button an ASCII text based standard for heath information sharing first introduced by the Veteran’s Administration to facilitate access to records stored in VistA by their patients. The newer Blue Button + format provides both human and machine readable formats. CCD (Continuity of Care Document) an XML-based patient summary based on the CDA architecture CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workshop) an HL7 standard for synchronizing and coordinating applications to automatically follow the patient, user (and other) contexts to allow the clinical u

Files as UI

Files as UI vs API - compares attributes of iCloud vs Dropbox. It starts on an interesting note - the model of a file system in the UI is dying, and should be let go. Beyond that it looks at mappings of each system to a file system from an API point of view and compares the successes of each. I find the initial thread the most interesting. Drop the mental model of a file system - which maps virtual concepts of files and directories to a physical model of papers, folders and file cabinets - and replace it with...what? This is a paradigm shift for me. I have to admit, I loath, hate, nay, despise looking for things. If I can't find something easily, it's only about a minute before I start growling and muttering things my mother would disapprove of. On this basis, I like the idea that I can save myself from thinking about where to put things or, where I have already put them. But how do we do this? It's non-trivial, since humans think of "things" and once they

Earnest Engineer

Search This Blog