talk-transcripts VS Akka

Thank you for this recommendation. I've never heard of it before and now I'm reading: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

It's giving me energy this Monday holiday(USA)!

race?

> [Audience reply: Sprinter]

> Right, only somebody who runs really short races, okay?

> [Audience laughter]

> But of course, we are programmers, and we are smarter than runners, apparently, because we know how to fix that problem, right? We just fire the starting pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint.

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

>So this is 10x, a full order of magnitude reduction in (?) severity before we get to the set of problems I think are more in the domain of what programming languages can help with, right? And because you can read these they'll all going to come up in a second as I go through each one on some slide so I'm not going to read them all out right now. But importantly there's another break where we get to trivialisms of problems in programming. Like typos and just being inconsistent, like, you thought you're going to have a list of strings and you put a number in there. That happens, you know, people make those kinds of mistakes, they're pretty inexpensive.

[0] Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU

[1] Slides and transcript: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

[2] Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5WdGrpoug

[3] Slides and transcript https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

This is tangentially related to Puzzles-vs-Problems in Rich Hickey's Effective Programs

> Eventually I got back to scheduling and again wrote a new kind of scheduling system in Common Lisp, which again they did not want to run in production. And then I rewrote it in C++. Now at this point I was an expert C++ user and really loved C++, for some value of love. But as we'll see later I love the puzzle of C++. So I had to rewrite it in C++ and it took, you know, four times as long to rewrite it as it took to write it in the first place, it yielded five times as much code and it was no faster. And that's when I knew I was doing it wrong.

[...]

> So I mean for young programmers, if everybody's tired and old, this doesn't matter any more. But when I was young, when I was young, I really, you know, when you're young you've got lots of free space. I used to say "an empty head", but that's not right. You've got a lot of free space available and you can fill it with whatever you like. And these type systems they're quite fun, because from an endorphin standpoint solving puzzles and solving problems is the same, it gives you the same rush. Puzzle solving is really cool. But that's not what it should be about.

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V1FtfBDsLU

Slides and transcript: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

Using triggers + history tables (aka audit tables) is the right answer 98% of the time. Just do it. If you're not already doing it, start today. It is a proven technique, in use for _over 30 years_.

Here's a quick rundown of how to do it generically https://gist.github.com/slotrans/353952c4f383596e6fe8777db5d... (trades off space efficiency for "being easy").

It's great if you can store immutable data. Really, really great. But you _probably_ have a ton of mutable data in your database and you are _probably_ forgetting a ton of it every day. Stop forgetting things! Use history tables.

cf. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

Do not use Papertrail or similar application-space history tracking libraries/techniques. They are slow, error-prone, and incapable of capturing any DB changes that bypass your app stack (which you probably have, and should). Worth remembering that _any_ attempt to capture an "updated" timestamp from your app is fundamentally incorrect, because each of your webheads has its own clock. Use the database clock! It's the only one that's correct!

Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) references Polya several times in his classic talk "Hammock Driven Development". Here's a transcript:

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

I've long been impressed by Hickey's problem solving skills, so I took much of this talk to heart, and even bought a copy of HTSI. Can't say it really helped me any more than Rich's talk (as a programmer) but I'm thinking I'll give it another look.

>Great product designs require no manual, and similarly, great interfaces need no documentation. Imagine having to read a manual on how to use a coffee mug.

This could not be more wrong.

Not everything is easy. If a library is addressing a complicated domain, solving by definition a complicated problem, it is fine if it requires some learning.

When did expertise and learning become bad things? If software is an engineering discipline, why would people in it ever promulgate the idea that any random cog can step in to any “engineer”s shoes?

Rich Hickey analogizes this mentality to the world of music, where it taken for granted that learning an instrument requires a lot of study:

“ We start with the cello. Should we make cellos that auto tune? Like, no matter where you put your finger, it's just going to play something good, play a good note.

“[Audience laughter]

“Like, you're good. We'll just fix that.

“ Should we have cellos with, like, red and green lights? Like, if you're playing the wrong note, you know, it's red. You slide around, and it's green. You're like, great! I'm good. I'm playing the right song. Right?

“ Or maybe we should have cellos that don't make any sound at all. Until you get it right, there's nothing.

“ [Audience laughter]”

https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

You might find adjacent talks and speakers here ... https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts

Many languages merge the two concepts, and implement procedures as functions that return void. This may muddle/complect their distinction, causing programmers to call procedures from within functions, thereby making those functions into impure functions (meaning that they affect the world outside of themselves, through side-effects like I/O or mutating state). This should be avoided, especially if you care about debug-ability and Functional Core, Imperative Shell architectures (see Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk at 31:56) (which make testing your system easier, without mocking).

A great way to do this in practice is to write design docs. I take an approach inspired by Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" - identify the problem, state it, write it down - describe what you know about it - try to describe what you know that you don't know about it - list the constraints your solution has to operate within - enumerate some potential solutions and explore their problems - (later) choose a path, and describe why it was chosen over the alternatives

Kotlin also has a construct for asynchronous collections/streams. Kotlin's version of AsyncSequence is called a Flow. Just as Swift's AsyncSequence builds upon prior experience with RxSwift and Combine, Kotlin's Flow APIs build upon earlier stream/collection APIs in the JVM ecosystem: Java's RxJava, Java8 Streams, Project Reactor, and Scala's Akka.

First-class distributed and multicore computing. Swift has first-class “actors” and “distributed” methods. Unison, Erlang, and Elixir are built with distributed being one of the #1 concerns. Though first-class is not super common and I don't really expect it to be because usually libraries are enough (e.g. Scala has Akka and is used WIDELY for distributed); whereas something like linear types and typed effects, you can't emulate in a library.

Akka is a library that implements the actor model for JVM languages. Mainly in Scala, but you can use it in Java too, and maybe others. It doesn't feel as ergonomic as Elixir, but if Elixir is too "out there" for the decision makers in your case, this might be a friendlier alternative.

Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible.

Note Akka, the Java & friends framework, is working with the actor model and have as main inspiration Erlang to mimic some features of the BEAM on top of the JVM.

Looking back at real dates, I started learning the language (Scala) back in 2008 because it was something new and trendy that interested me. I started spending some serious time with it in 2009 (helping out other newcomers and making small contributions to various projects), and then in 2010 became a core contributor to the Akka project (you can find me a little ways down this list: https://github.com/akka/akka/graphs/contributors). For the most part I worked on the features I wanted to, but worked on other things if a user asked nicely. Akka became very popular in the early 2010s, so all of a sudden I had highly sought after skills. Got hired by a London based company and moved myself and my family from Canada over here. But even today, that exposure I got 10 years ago still helps me to land new contracts.

In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561

Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.

Lightbend, the company owning Akka, recently shared a blog post signed by the CEO announcing a license change from Apache 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1, a proprietary license. You can already find it in this PR, merged a couple days ago.

Akka 2.6 is on the open source Apache license, that is unchanged (its not possible for Lightbend to change an existing license). Its only the new Akka 2.7 which has the BSL license, so as long as you don't upgrade you are fine. See https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561.