Alessandro Lacava

In love with FP and type systems. Scala developer. Coauthor of Professional Scala - Wrox

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Let's be honest, learning statically-typed functional programming is harder than the imperative one BUT reasoning about pure functional programs is much easier. I myself prefer to spend more time learning than debugging programs.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@gabro27 Comparing how frequently I change the configuration to how frequently I rebuild the application and deploy, anyway, it’s not a big deal in my opinion. Of course, as usual, YMMV.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Config files should be the exception, not the rule. Configuration is code.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

TFW your integration test catches a bug, introduced in an external service, that could have been caught with a simple unit test on their side.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@gabro27 Yeah, probably there are three hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things and designing a decent Date API.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Now, seriously, why should anyone decide to design it like that? JavaScript is so f*cked up folks!
year -> the actual year
day -> the actual day
month -> the actual...nope! it's 0-based.
https://t.co/nWN5IokC58

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@propensive As a firm believer in the presumption of innocence I’m very happy I never signed that letter. Welcome back Jon!

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

So, yesterday I finally decided to tinker with Scala 3. Well, after like 15 minutes I stumbled upon a compiler bug. Srsly, what are the odds? Anyway I discussed it in discord https://t.co/XDVnmNiAay and it has readily been reported as a bug by som-snytt https://t.co/2pT2my5uGi

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

A junior dev never applies DRY.
A senior dev always applies it.
A wise dev applies DRY only where it’s needed.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Don't get me wrong, comments are important. Nevertheless, never stop wondering if what you're writing as a comment can be expressed in your code, instead, and make it clearer.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Annotate every type in Scala. The time you're going to save when you read the code in the future is much more than the one you'd save taking advantage of type inference to avoid some more typing.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

When designing your ADTs always keep in mind that:
ab + ac + ad = a(b + c + d)

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Bollocks! We Italians are great at queueing! (tongue in cheek)

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

Only a British person will quietly join the back of a five-mile queue, without even bothering to attempt to look how far ahead it stretches, not even looking up from their phone, maybe a small bottle of water in the other hand… showing the rest of the world how queuing is done.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

It’s really amazing how many people didn’t understand it was a joke.

[Inactive; Bluesky is @hillelwayne(dot)com @hillelogram]

Gen-Z programmers are always chasing the new shiny thing like Tailwind and Svelte instead of learning CS fundamentals, like React

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@mandubian Congratulations!

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Hey junior devs: many senior devs will suggest you read some academic/difficult books on programming, such as TAOCP. You can be sure most of them read from 0% to 5% of the pages of those books, so don't feel down if you don't fully understand them and move on.

[Martin Odersky @odersky]

Exciting news: We are starting a large scale research project to develop a universal theory of resources and effects based on capabilities.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@gabro27 Congratulations Gabriele!

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@alexelcu In the context of IO, always. It’s more explicit and always composable regardless of it being top-level or down in the flatMap chain.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

@TeddyBeer82 Also `select` or `keep` but not filter, definitely.

[Alessandro Lacava @lambdista]

Talking about naming things: IMO `filter` is, probably, one of the worst and most ambiguous name ever given to a method of a std lib.