Over the last couple of weeks I did an OO programming experiment. I call it the Erlang design pattern. It is based on the Actor model but goes some steps further. At its core just like the Actor model there are active entities (objects) that have a thread and a message queue with the thread waiting on the message queue to do some stuff.The Erlang design pattern extends the Actor model by first dividing the software program into active (actors, that have their own thread) and passive (objects, whose methods are called by other actors) objects.Second, I enforced that all methods of an ...

I recently released a couple of API clients for the Ge.tt file sharing service, one in Perl and one in Python. (I am just a fan of the service, not an employee or contractor.) I would judge myself an "intermediate" pythonista mostly due to inexperience. It's a culture shock coming from a background of CPAN. The old joke is that Perl is just a life support system for CPAN and that is arguably true, but I am here to tell you: you may not appreciate how good Perl hackers have it with respect to CPAN and the culture around documenting, packaging and testing distros once they're on CPAN.It's hard ...

He tried to understand that one concept for a couple of months before it made sense to him. Admittedly, partial functions are not intuitive for anyone who has been schooled in traditional programming, but still, looking at the problem he was trying to solve it seemed like James was required to expend too much effort relative to the simplicity of the problem (as he pointed out, now that he understands the concept it seems straightforward).He showed me the code, and it was basically a situation where there was common code in the existing function, and the partial function completion allowed the ...

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the me...

For most of you the patterns mentioned below should be nothing new. These are very basic stuff we slap into our code everyday and at times feels they are actually code smells than smart patterns. However, I've been doing some code reviewing lately and came across many code that lacks even these basic traits. So I thought of writing them down as a help for novice developers who would want to get a better grasp at these.These patterns are commonly applicable in most general purpose programming languages, with slight syntactical changes. I use Ruby and JavaScript for the examples in this post.Ver...

I believe that making a game is part art and part science, so it's no wonder that managing a game project is also part art and part science. Clearly if it was all science then the industry would get a collective F for not having made any significant progress over the last decade - all one has to do is just glance at the published postmortems to see that the same patterns are repeated over and over.A game has to be fun, engaging, grab users in the first two minutes and also keep their attention for countless more hours. These requirements place a very difficult burden onto design dire...

IntroductionJust few weeks ago, I have resigned as a "full on" web developer (frontend, backend, server admin and misc) and moved on to become a pure frontend developer (yay)! It is a really exciting change, as you might know frontend developer role didn't exist few years ago. Thanks to the introduction of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript framework, frontend development has to be separated from backend due to its complexity, and I think I'm trained to fit in that gap nicely.For many years, I've equipped myself with many tools and techniques to speed up frontend development, and here I will share all...