Neeky Driven Development, #4

Discoveries in tech, programming, science and sometimes Magic.

Word

intangible /ɪnˈtan(d)ʒɪb(ə)l/— something that does not exist as a physical thing but is still valuable to a company.

Blog

Farnam Street — not simply a blog, but a hub of great thinkers.

Check out this recent article to get an outlook on what's it all about: The Value of Grey Thinking.

Farnam Street is an online intellectual hub that helps you get an edge, avoid problems, and live a smarter life.

My goal is to help you go to bed each night smarter than when you woke up. I’ll do this by giving you tools, ideas, and frameworks for thinking. We cover topics like human misjudgment, decision making, strategy, and philosophy.

Book

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — book recommended by Uncle Bob in his talk Functional Programming; What? Why? When?

And it's free and online now, MIT is giving it away. You may also download PDF and view video lectures for it.

And of course the talk itself is a must-listen to everyone. For those who are too lazy to watch I'll deliver the main thought here:

…Typically in a computer book the first thing you learn is an assignment statement [e.g. 'x = x + 1;']. They [authors of the book] delayed it for 259 pages and they apologised for it…

…Once you introduce an assignment statement you can no longer replace a function call with it's implementation. Why? Because the state of the system may have changed. An assignment statement introduces the concept of time.

Time becomes important whenever you have an assignment statement — it separates the code below the assignment and the code above the assignment because the state of the system has changed.

But in a functional program statement y = f(x) will always be true no matter what time it is. No external force can change the value of f(x).

And this matters for testing — when we do not need to deal with state our tests are more robust. This matters to concurrency. Functional programs are way easier scaled to multiple threads due to lack of state. And they are simpler and easier to read, you may show now your Java 8 program to your non-tech manager and expect some understanding of what it does. The only problem is memory usage.

And what do we know about memory? — It's dirt cheap. It has gotten absurdly cheap. We are filthy rich with the stuff!

"But functional programs are slower!", you'd say. But look at this graph

Look at 2004, the growth of clock speed fell flat 12 years ago. Even when the Moore's law will come to it's twilight due to obvious limitation of the silicon technology, on large cloud-computing scale we will still be just adding more cores. And argument of stateful programs being faster falls of in the perspective of scalability.

Podcast

Data Sceptic — a podcast that alternates between short mini episodes and longer interviews. For the mini-episodes, Kyle and Linh Da explore basic data science concepts. Longer interviews feature practitioners and experts on interesting topics related to data, all through the eye of scientific skepticism.

This podcast is always a joy to listen. If you want to get sucked in right away — try Goodhart’s Law, The Elbow Method or my favorite Too Good to be True.