Erlang: Dispatching Closures (aka: why we don’t do OOP)

Oh my! It’s like “Creating nouns in the kingdom of verbs“!(The link above is to a great post from Steve Yegge — read it and come back if you aren’t already familiar with it.) I wrote a funny little module today to demonstrate to a friend why FP folks sometimes refer to OOP objects as […]

Tiny strings-as-strings JSON in portable Erlang

There are several JSON libs for Erlang at this point, and as there is no correct mapping between JSON types and Erlang types, all make different tradeoffs that either work or don’t for your project. Beyond that, various interface and implementation differences exist due to the tradeoffs inherent in manipulating elements of the Black Tongue […]

Iterators? We Don’t NEED No Stinking Iterators!

Every so often a request for “implementation of iterators for maps” over hashes/maps/dicts or some other K-V data structure appears on mailing list for a functional langauge. I’ve spent years making heavy use of iterators in imperative languages, and the way they fit into Python is really great. For Python. I totally understand where some […]

On Looping and Recursion

This post was prompted by a discussion about various programming languages on the Scientific Linux Forum. The discussion is in the member’s sub-forum, so I can’t link it here very effectively. wearetheborg wrote: I don’t understand the statement “…develop a sense time being slices along the t-axis (similar to thinking transactionally) instead of dealing in […]