I’ve seen a relatively common anti-pattern in Object-Oriented development, although to be fair, I’ve seen something closely akin in non OO languages as well.  The following C# code is a demonstration of the issue:   Can you spot the problem? The problem is the constructor and the f function using the class variable _m directly.  [...]

I often think of why I feel that it’s important to have a functional language—not just write code that’s pseudo-functional in an imperative language.  As I think this through, I wanted to record some of my ideas on the subject. Even the best developers I’ve known are almost always inclined to take the defaults.  I [...]

At a few points in my career I’ve worked in tech support.  It’s an experience I heartily recommend to every developer.  Every developer should spend at least a month or two supporting software because it helps you to understand the sorts of issues our tech support people deal with.  I really believe that too many [...]

Jon Harrop, who is a strong advocate for functional programming, recently tweeted some links to questions on programmers.stackexchange.com (here and here) I’m generalizing a bit (not much though) but the basic substance of these questions amounted to “Why Should I Learn Functional Programming?”   It’s a fair question.  I’ve been a developer and around developers long [...]

So recently some of us were discussing the fact that F# 3.0 is going to add a feature to make it more amenable to OO programmers.  F# 3.0 will add automatic “getters” and “setters” for members of a class. A small digression; I prefer the terms “inspector” and “mutator” because they seem more precise. If [...]