Month: January 2012

Currying vs partial function application

By jonskeet

This is a slightly odd post, and before you read it you should probably put yourself into one of three buckets: Someone who doesn’t care too much about functional programming, and finds higher order functions tricky: feel free to skip this post entirely. Someone who knows all about functional programming, and already knows the difference between currying and partial function application: please read this post carefully and post comments about any inaccuracies you find. (Yes, the CAPTCHA is broken on Chrome; sorry.) Someone who doesn’t know much about functional programming yet, but is interested to learn more: please take this … Continue reading Currying vs partial function application

Eduasync part 19: ordering by completion, ahead of time…

By jonskeet

Today’s post involves the MagicOrdering project in source control (project 28). When I wrote part 16 of Eduasync, showing composition in the form of majority voting, one reader mailed me a really interesting suggestion. We don’t really need to wait for any of the tasks to complete on each iteration of the loop – we only need to wait for the next task to complete. Now that sounds impossible – sure, it’s great if we know the completion order of the tasks, but half the point of asynchrony is that many things can be happening at once, and we don’t … Continue reading Eduasync part 19: ordering by completion, ahead of time…

Coding in the style of Glee

By jonskeet

As previously mentioned, at CodeMash 2012 I gave a very silly Pecha Kucha talk entitled "Coding in the style of Glee". The video is on YouTube, or can be seen embedded below: (There’s also another YouTube video from a different angle.) This post gives the 20 slides (which were just text; no fancy pictures unlike my competitors) and what I meant to say about them. (Edited very slightly to remove a couple of CodeMash-specific in-jokes.) Don’t forget that each slide was only up for 20 seconds. Coding in the style of Glee As you may know, I’m from the UK, … Continue reading Coding in the style of Glee

CodeMash 2012 report

By jonskeet

I’m nearly home – on a bus back from Heathrow airport to Reading – returning from CodeMash 2012. This was my first US conference, and I had a wonderful time. It was pretty densely packed in terms of presenting / recording for me: I presented two back-to-back sessions jointly with Bill Wagner, on async. These went down really well (particularly Bill’s genius idea of using the Doctor Who quote about time being a "big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff") and were great fun to give. Bill’s a class act, and I think we got the balance between use and underpinnings … Continue reading CodeMash 2012 report

Eduasync part 18: Changes between the Async CTP and the Visual Studio 11 Preview

By jonskeet

In preparation for CodeMash, I’ve been writing some more async code and decompiling it with Reflector. This time I’m using the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – the version which installs alongside Visual Studio 2010 under Windows 7. (Don’t ask me about any other features of Visual Studio 11 – I haven’t explored it thoroughly; I’ve really only used it for the C# 5 bits.) There have been quite a few changes since the CTP – they’re not visible changes in terms of code that you’d normally write, but the state machine generated by the C# compiler is reasonably different. … Continue reading Eduasync part 18: Changes between the Async CTP and the Visual Studio 11 Preview

Awaiting CodeMash 2012

By jonskeet

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m attempting to make 2012 a quiet year in terms of my speaking engagements – I’ve turned down a few kind offers already, and I expect to do so again during the year. I may well still give user group talks in evenings if I can do so without having to take holiday, but full conferences are likely to be out, especially international ones. This is partly so I can take more time off to support my wife, Holly, who has her own books to promote. This year will be particularly important for Holly as she’s … Continue reading Awaiting CodeMash 2012