There has been quite a few inflamatory discussions in the twitterverse and the blogosphere recently regarding some of the ultra-functional voices dominating the Scala ecosystem. It's true that Scala is an object functional language. And it's also true that you can stretch Scala in both ways to get enough mileage out of it. Talking about the functional ...

It has been quite some time I have decided to play around with sjson once again. For the convenience of those who are not familiar with sjson, it's a tiny JSON serialization library that can serialize and de-serialize Scala objects. sjson offers two ways in which you can serialize your Scala objects :-typeclass based serialization, where you define ...

Since I started writing DSLs In Action (buy here)*, a lot of my friends and readers asked me about my decision to make the book polyglotic. Indeed right from the word go, I had decided to treat the topic of DSL based design without a significant bias towards any specific language. Even today after the book has been published, many readers come up to ...

Fighting with impedance mismatch has been quite a losing battle so far in the development of software systems. We fight mismatch to handle stateful interactions with a stateless protocol. We fight mismatch of paradigms between the user interface layers, domain layers and data layers. Nothing concrete has emerged till date, though there has been quite ...

One of the papers that influenced me a lot in 2010 was The Essence of the Iterator Pattern by Jeremy Gibbons and Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira. It builds upon where McBride and Paterson left in their treatise on Applicative Functors. Gibbons' paper discusses the various aspects of building traversal structures in the presence of effects.In this post I look ...

Happy New Year! Have a blast .. See ya all ...

In my earlier post on composable domain models, I wrote about the following DSL that captures the enrichment of a security trade by computing the applicable tax/fees and then the net cash value of the trade. It uses chained composition of scalaz functors .. In this post we are going to improve upon the compositionality, introduce a new computation ...

It all started with a mail from Christina of Manning expressing their interest in publishing a book on building parsers in Scala. She mentioned that they have come across a blog post of mine titled External DSLs made easy with Scala Parser Combinators and Marjan Bace (Publisher) would like to talk to me on this possible venture. I still remember that ...

Monads and applicative functors are both used to model computations - yet it's interesting to note the subtle differences in the way they handle sequencing of effects. Both of them support an applicative style of effectful programming that lets you write code in pointfree style (in Haskell) making your code look so expressive.Applicative functors are ...

I have been having some solid fun working through scalaz - it's possibly as close you can get to Haskell with a postfunctional language like Scala, which also supports object oriented paradigms. One of the ways I do learn languages is by developing domain models using the idioms that the language offers and try to make the model as expressive as possible. ...