Friday 25 November 2016

Random Questions

  • What is "Black Friday", and why?
  • What is a "comfort zone" and where do I get one?  Can I rent or do I buy it?
  • Is a "steep learning curve" one where I get from the bottom to the top quickly and easily or one where the route from the bottom to the top is difficult? (It's a lousy metaphor if it works two contradictory ways).
  • How much exactly is "most if not all"? Most? All? Which? Either? On the same note how hard is "difficult if not impossible"? So difficult it's effectively impossible? Or very difficult but not actually impossible? Or either difficult or impossible but you don't know which? Why not find out and tell us instead of leaving us dangling with an "if"...? What if I said, "The answer to your question is yes if not no"... How informed would you be?

Friday 4 November 2016

F Sharp for Pleasure and well just pleasure really

The language F# has its origins at Microsoft and is now available in the latest versions of Visual Studio - but looking at fsharp.org I see there is an option to use F# on Linux.

But first you need Mono for it to run on... which I did basically by following the instructions on the Mono site.  The instructions are nice and clear so I resist the inclination to copy them here.

Then to test.  Create a file called hello.cs containing this code:

using System;

public class HelloWorld
{
    static public void Main ()
    {
        Console.WriteLine ("Hello Mono World");
    }
}

Then on the command line (you can come out of super user mode now) compile with this command:

mcs hello.cs

This creates a file called hello.exe that you can execute:

$ mcs hello.cs
$ ls h*
hello.cs  hello.exe
$ ./hello.exe
Hello Mono World
$ mono hello.exe
Hello Mono World


You can execute with the command mono but I didn't spot this and I find you can invoke the hello.exe directly. What have I just done? Blimey I've typed in and compiled a C# program almost without realising it.

So anyway that does demonstrate that Mono is installed... jolly good.

So I next need

apt-get install fsharp

Looks ok.  This installs fsharpc (the compiler) and fsharpi (the interactive REPL)

Possibly at this point... install Visual Studio Code...?

OK go on then.

Had to log off and log on as administrator to get this to work. It's a download from the Visual Studio Code web site.

However this seems to be in place.  Then you add the F-Sharp mode to the editor by going

Ctrl-P
ext install Ionide-fsharp


Then you select the right one, opt to install and then activate.

So that was very successful - the F Sharp site and the Mono site have excellent instructions for getting set up.

Now also there is an F-Sharp mode for Emacs.  I'll look into that another day.

Thursday 3 November 2016

Crossing the Bridge

And having started from that left hand end of the bridge in an engineering role I have tried to explore some of the delights that await as you cross to the other side.

One of the odd pleasures of this challenge is seeing how difficult things become clear... but if anything even more delightful is to find how obvious things start to become problems.

A processor has executed an instruction. What can it do next? Just three things.

It can move on to the next instruction: and so the idea of a sequence is natural and obvious.

It can jump back to a previous instruction. And so the idea of a loop is present, but not yet obvious. We know that to jump back just anywhere is the road to madness. The jump has to be educated, trained to fit into the pattern. I write lots of flowcharts. To apply the pattern I have a rule that jumps back from the main flow must go to the right (anticlockwise) and furthermore no line is allowed to cross another.  So this is allowed:

But this is not:

Stick to the discipline and you have created the logic of the loop from the potential chaos of the jump.

And what is the other option? The processor can jump forward. Therefore it has opted to omit some part of the process, we are creating the conditional if / else construction. Here again my jumps need to submit to the discipline: all jumps down must go to the right, and no line is allowed to cross another. So this is allowed:

But not this:

This is what a proper if / else brings out in a higher level language.

And so given the sequence, the loop, and the conditional, we have the essence of structured programming. Everything we need.

What could be more obvious?

But then we start to wander across this enchanted bridge and soon we discover mysteries.

I clearly remember when I was learning Scheme, just about the first thing I wanted to write was the table of Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion from somewhere near the start of Kernighan & Ritchie. And I sat there thinking... just a minute, hold it right there, how exactly do I write a FOR loop? Surely there's got to be a way to write a FOR loop, otherwise...

Then of course you encounter the delights of looping by recursion, and the more mature delight of realising that your loops dissolve in functions that operate on collections directly, you discover MAP and FOLD and FILTER and so on. So the loop, which seemed so obviously essential to programming, becomes a stage that you leave behind. Odd. Disturbing and yet illuminating.

How truly it is written, In the search of the Way, every day something is left behind (Tao Te Ching Ch.48)

Next you discover pattern matching and see how a function can fork according to the structure of its arguments and you start to realise that you can make conditions without going through IF... in fact do you need IF at all? Can all your decisions be made on the basis of pattern matching with the odd guard or two here and there? Does IF go in the bin next to LOOP?

Then the final stage of your enlightenment comes when you discover that the sequence has now... gone. That most obvious thing of all, the increment of the program counter, becomes a problem that the Masters have to invoke arcane spells from mathematics to solve.

It turns out that even


is no longer allowed...