Happy Path Programming (Bruce Eckel & James Ward)

Change happens, but slowwwwly. How can we accelerate the adoption of new & better programming language features? Should we?

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When Gunnar Morling announced the 1 Billion Row Challenge a few weeks ago, he had no idea it'd go crazy viral.

Resources:

• Challenge details: www.morling.dev/blog/one-billion-row-challenge
• Rust 1BRC Blog: aminediro.com/posts/billion_row/
• Cliff Click's implementation walkthrough: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJNIbgV6j-Y
• James' very slow Scala ZIO implementation: github.com/jamesward/1brc-zio/blob/main/src/main/scala/Main.scala

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Once again we lament build tools. Then we get blocked talking about Reactive, async, non-blocking, actors, and concurrency.

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In episode 2 we continue the conversation about Kotlin, things we enjoy and things that could be better.

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Magnus Madsen, language designer for the Flix programming language, joins us to talk about the driving principles and innovative features of the language.

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We chat with Trisha Gee about Test Driven Development (TDD), flaky tests, ops & observability for builds, and developer productivity.

Mentioned TDD Article:

The beautiful theory of TDD and the reality check of practice

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James shares about a blog he posted this week titled: "The Modern Java Platform - 2021 Edition"

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We chat with Philip Hölzenspies, one of the maintainers of the new Pkl configuration language (pkl-lang.org).

Resources:

• James' Pkl for GitHub Actions: github.com/jamesward/pklgha

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Announcing Graboo, a collection of experiments to reduce friction with Gradle. Repo:

https://github.com/jamesward/graboo

Buy your Happy Path Programming Shirt:

https://happy-path.printify.me/products

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Sabine went from acedemia and a PhD in formal methods, to Python, Elm, Haskell, and now OCaml. We chat about this journey and some of the reasons why OCaml is an awesome modern language.

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Jorge Vasquez has been working on a way to have more precise data modeling while not sacrificing performance or ergonomics. Smart Types in ZIO Prelude are the answer, and they are amazing!

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Bruce & James have a delightful chat with long-time friend Dianne Marsh about changing tech culture to be more vulnerable and diverse.

Note: The Non-Violent Communication trainer mentioned in the episode is Karl Steyaert.

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What are the reasons to adopt or migrate to a new technology?  What prevents you from doing so?  We explore that question and the differences between green-field and brown-field.  Then we finally dive deep into Monads trying to conquer the Curse of the Monad.

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Python usage surpasses Java to second place on the Tiobe Index (behind C). Is developer productivity the primary driver? We then switch gears to talk about the concept of "Making Illegal States Unrepresentable" where James continues his crusade against the Builder Pattern.

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Long-time Java author & expert, Cedric Beust, joins us to revisit some of the topics from our Kotlin episodes.  We talk more deeply about checked exceptions, null safety, the builder pattern, build systems, and of-course Monads.

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We chat with April Wensel, founder of Compassionate Coding, about helping programmers bring more compassion to themselves and others.

Resources:

• Confessions of a Recovering Jerk Programmer
• Marshall Rosenberg - Nonviolent Communication
• Kristin Neff - Self-Compassion
• Karen Armstrong - Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
• UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center definition of compassion
• Oren Jay Sofer's Needs & Feelings Lists

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No doubt that Rust is hot right now. We chat with Christopher Hunt about his journey through Java, Scala, and many other languages and learn why he is now using Rust.

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Heather Miller, Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon, joins us to talk about her research into composability in distributed systems, the challenges with serialization, and a better approach to Chaos Engineering.

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In this episode we discuss things that are often overlooked in developer experience and what underlying values make developer experience an afterthought.

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James, as a Scala "True Believer," talks about his experiences with Kotlin and how they compare to Scala. Then he switches gears to rant about runtime reflection which leads to a deeper conversation about meta-programming and alternatives to runtime reflection.

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Bruce and James have struggled with Gradle for years and Bruce this week blogged about some of his gripes: The Problem with Gradle. This prompted a lengthy response from Cédric Champeau.

James has mostly stuck to Java 8 and Bruce is exploring Java 11.

Finally, James rants about SemVer for the 3.1.4'th time.

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We chat with Trond Hjorteland about Agile and why it hasn't led to successful outcomes in many traditional organizations.

Mentioned and related resources:

• Trond & João Rosa's training on Agile + DP2
• Open Systems Theory
• LinkedIn Group for Open Systems Theory
• More material on Open Systems Theory
• Resource List from Trond
• Some of Trond's recorded talks

Our friend Joey Gibson joins us to talk about Smalltalk, the well known grandfather of Object Oriented Programming.  James is assigned some homework to get a Smalltalk web app running on Google Cloud Run, which he did (after recording). Check out the source: https://github.com/jamesward/hello-pharo

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WebAssembly (Wasm) finds a way for the web to move forward to near-native performance while avoiding the limitations of JavaScript.  In this episode we chat with Vivek Sekhar, a product manager on the Chrome team, about all the Wasm things and how they relate to a better foundation for cross-platform, high performance apps, in the browser, on the cloud, and maybe just everywhere.

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Holly Cummins, a Senior Principal Software Engineer on Quarkus at Redhat, joins us to chat about Microservices and Quarkus.

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We learn about Algebraic Effects with the Scala library Kyo ( getkyo.io) from the creator, Flavio Brasil.

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In our first episode we discuss features of the Kotlin programming language that we like.

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Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) is a set of tools & practices that help engineers be more productive. We chat with Justin Reock, field CTO at Gradle, about why more organizations need DPE and what that really means.  Learn more at: https://gradle.com/developer-productivity-engineering/

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Finally Bruce gets a whole episode about Python with our friend Luciano Ramalho, author of Fluent Python.  In the words of Luciano:

"Thanks James and Bruce for the most enjoyable podcast panel I ever had!"

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First a short rant about mutability followed by learning about Smithy, an Interface Description Language (IDL), with Jakub Kozłowski.

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Diana Montalion teaches us about Systems Thinking and why it matters for those of us building software. Diana is founder of ⁠Mentrix⁠, which teaches "systems architecture skills for an increasingly complex world."

Pre-Order Diana's book: Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills and Practices for Software Professionals

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF

FEE, FOO, FUD, and FUM (Fear, Uncertainty, and Monads) - Scala Giant, Dick Wall, joins Bruce and James to talk about life, work, and Functional Programming.

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A stroll through 20 years of Spring with Josh Long. Also: Bruce, James, and Josh announce their new Ska band.

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Bruce, James, and their friend Bill are working on a new book about systems that are Performant, Reliable, Expressive, and Productive. This episode explores those themes with some significant detours along the way.

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Bruce and James chat with their long time friend Bill Venners about Scala 3 and the updates to his "Programming in Scala" book.

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Bruce and James chat with Barry Hawkins about software methodologies, their triumphs and abuses.

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Bruce and James chat about the future of programming.

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We chat with the Kafka Duchess, Anna McDonald, about Apache Kafka, CQRS, Event Sourcing, and of-course Functional Programming.

Note: There was a bit of echo for a few minutes but we did resolve it around 8 minutes in.

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Bruce continues his archaeological dig into the foundations of mainstream programming.

Referenced blog: Why Are There Functions?

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We chat with Oliver Drotbohm about what Domain-Driven Design is and how it might intersect with Microservices, Monoliths, or Moduliths. Mentioned resources:

• Parnas on modularity
• Chris Richardson – Introducing Assemblage - a microservice architecture definition process
• Spring Modulith Project
• Introducing Spring Modulith

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We start off talking about Cloud Native Buildpacks and Containers which of-course leads to James trying to explain Kubernetes.  Then we dive into what "Happy Path Programming" means and how, while the term is somewhat derogatory, it is what we ultimately want.  We end with a discussion about Bruce's recent explorations into Rust and gRPC.

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Bruce and James often rant about build tools but it turns out they are hard to get right. We dive into the reasons with Josh Suereth who maintained sbt (a Scala build tool) for a number of years.

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James rants about databases with Jonas Bonér, CEO of Lightbend and creator of Akka. Bruce & James also learn about the actor model, Reactive, and Akka Serverless.

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Bruce shares exciting news about completing the Atomic Kotlin book. The rest is a mishmash of topics related to newsworthy announcements including Spring Boot Cloud Event support, Serverless + TestContainer + Kubernetes Cassandra support, and Scala ZIO CLI.

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We start off discussing what the future of programming might be... Can developers stop thinking about resource limitations?  Can we make the "right path" easy?  Then we dive into Inner Source and the organizational & cultural challenges with adopting it.

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We dive deep on GraalVM and learn from Alina Yurenko about all the problems it solves.

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Our chat with John De Goes starts with his Scala & Rust journeys, then goes into Golem Cloud, a serverless durable computing platform underpinned by Wasm, and ends with a discussion about whether business applications really need parallelism.

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As usual, Bruce & James try to figure out monads & type classes. Then something new, as they go meta on design patterns.

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Most of us have managers but they aren't always great. We chat with James' best manager, Sushila Sahay, about what makes her such a great manager. We also dive a bit into open source business models since Sushila has deep experience in that realm.

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Rod Johnson (creator of Spring Framework) reflects on his programming and chess journeys.

References:

• ScalaDays 2013 Talk
• Stockfish Chess Engine

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Culture - the hidden force that sometimes reveals itself through code reviews. What is it & how does it form / change?

Also, Developer Marketing and how most companies do it wrong.

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Gabriella Gonzalez joins to teach us about the Dhall configuration language they created and Nix.

References:

The Dhall configuration language

Henk: a typed intermediate language

Pants Build Tool

The Purely Functional Software Deployment Model

Haskell for all: How to use NixOS for lightweight integration tests

How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer

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Zalim Bashorov (@bashorov) works on Kotlin/Wasm at JetBrains and answers our many questions about Wasm, GC, the Component Model, and other future proposals.

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After being told many times that Nix is all we dream for when it comes to software packaging, we finally chat with Domen Kožar and learn all about Nix.

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Johannes Schickling (@schickling | schickling.dev⁠) gets us up-to-speed on Effect, the ZIO-inspired Effect System for TypeScript, and the Local-First movement. Resources:

• Local-First Podcast: www.localfirst.fm
• Ink & Switch's Local-First Essay: www.inkandswitch.com/local-first
• Effect (TypeScript Library): effect.website
• Riffle research project: riffle.systems
• LiveStore: github.com/livestorejs
• Overtone: overtone.pro

Related Episodes:

• #81 TypeScript & Effects with Michael Arnaldi
• #62 Musing About Local-First Sync & CRDTs with Mark McGranaghan

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF

We learn the motivations behind Haskell and why it is the pinnacle of Functional Programming from Kris Jenkins, a Developer Advocate at Confluent.

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Katie Levy joins Bruce & James to talk about how to help teams adopt Kotlin and Functional Programming.

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Renee Shah is a partner at Amplify Partners, an early stage venture capital firm. We discuss some broad industry trends: Edge, Wasm, Distributed Systems, Functional Programming, and much more!

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Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, joins us to chat about Scala, Effects, Exceptions, Experiments, and other Exciting stuff.

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Most developers have been exposed to inheritance based polymorphism but there are other ways to deal with overlapping functionality. In this episode we talk about ad-hoc polymorphism, parametric polymorphism, and type classes.

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The creator of the new Roc programming language, Richard Feldman, joins us to talk about rocking developers worlds' with better tools & paradigms.

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We chat with Dormain Drewitz about failure and reliability. Ironically our recording software crashed near the end of the episode but we recovered and wrapped things up.

Referenced Article: 10 Years of Failure Friday at PagerDuty: Fostering Resilience, Learning and Reliability

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Bruce and James hear about Wiem's journey in Functional Programming, her contributions to Scala ZIO, and how she never gave up despite the challenges she faced.

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Testcontainers are one of James' favorite modern technologies and in this episode we chat with Sergei Egorov, one of the project creators.  We learn about what Testcontainers are and the new Testcontainers Cloud service created by Sergei's new company, AtomicJar.

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We chat with Gwen Shapira, co-founder of Nile, about her journey to creating a virtualized, serverless Postgres database service. We also dive into the challenges with traditional data architectures and approaches like ORMs.

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Adam Fraser is a core contributor to Scala ZIO. He joins us to chat about improvements in ZIO 2 and how we can grow adoption.

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We chat with Valentina Servile about her upcoming book on Continuous Deployment and reducing the risks to keeping HEAD not just always deployable, but automatically deployed to production.

Book for preorder on Amazon: Continuous Deployment: Enable Faster Feedback, Safer Releases, and More Reliable Software

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF

Open Source is an essential foundation for pretty much everything. How do we fund it appropriately? What do we do about Log4Shell-types of issues?  Donald Fischer of Tidelift joins us to discuss these economic and human issues.

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⁠Stephan Janssen⁠ is always on the bleeding edge of both helping developers grow and with how he uses technology to accomplish amazing things. He led the creation of Devoxx but is a coder at heart. Stephan shares his journey with AI, both as a "library" in his applications and also as an "assistant" that helps him iterate and program more quickly.

Resources:

• DevoxxGenie IntelliJ Plugin
• Ollama
• LangChain for Java
• LMstudio
• Llama.cpp
• James on The AI Native Dev Podcast: Rethinking Software Development: James Ward on AI's Role in Software Testing and Coding

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF⁠

According to James, Heroku had the best company culture / vibe of anywhere he has worked. Bruce & James talk with Sharon Schmidt who is in large part responsible for creating that magical experience.

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Grace Jansen joins us to chat about how bees and biology can help us better understand software development tools & paradigms like Reactive, Kubernetes, and maybe parts of the 15 Factor App methodology (a modernized version of the Twelve-Factor App methodology).

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Bruce and James chat with their friend Julie Amundson about AI, Machine Learning, and many related complexities.  They explore what the journey is like for Data Scientists at medium / large companies where everything from data access to productionizing models, has challenges.  Also we learn about the Metaflow system Julie's team built to make this journey smoother at Netflix.

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We explore with Daniel Terhorst-North how social and technical feedback loops can help us build the right thing faster.

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Bruce and James' coauthor Bill Frasure, joins to talk with Kit Langton, creator of ZIO Magic and many other magical ZIO tools & libraries.

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With the eminent release of Scala 3, we chat about the language changes, effect systems (ZIO), and reliability.

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Mark McGranaghan joins us to talk about how the Muse app uses Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) for local-first data synchronization.

More details on Local-first: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Referenced article about hybrid logical clocks: https://archive.jlongster.com/using-crdts-in-the-wild

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Paul Snively helps us see the future of programming. Spoiler: It's Typed & Functional.

Referenced talks:

Types vs. Tests: An Epic Battle?

Type Systems - The Good, Bad and Ugly

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Software architectures, organizational management, hiring practices, and many other normal part of life give us an illusion of control.  But is there another way?

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We chat with Adam Warski about Loom, Virtual Threads, and his Loom-based Scala library, Ox, for structured concurrency & Go-Like Channels.

Referenced articles & code:

• Ox EasyRacer Client
• Go statement considered harmful
• Go-like selects using jox channels in Java
• Limits of Loom's performance
• Fast and Scalable Channels in Kotlin Coroutines

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/nPa76qF

All about Dependency Injection, why we do it, and why James thinks it is terrible.

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We begin by talking about personal developer productivity but then expand the scope to "collective" / team productivity.  This leads us to grapple with some challenging ideas around Agile, non-violent communication, organization structures, diversity, and inclusion.

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A bike-shedless discussion about nulls, algebraic data types, and code formatting.

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We've mentioned the futuristic Unision programming language many times but now we dive deep with one of the co-founders.

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The legendary Viktor Klang chats with Bruce & James about information loss, reactive, emergence, and many other mind expanding topics.

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At the Rust Developer Retreat we explored Structured Concurrency with Tokio. With the attendees we chat about our projects and things learned, liked, and disliked about Rust. Then dive into Structured Concurrency generally and specific implementations.

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Bruce describes his multi-decade journey running conferences and how letting go of control, while still having a structure, has led to conferences where attendees connect in meaningful ways.

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Michael created Effect, a functional effect system inspired by Scala ZIO, for TypeScript. We chat about Functional Programming, the TypeScript language, and Effects.

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Object Oriented Programming might just be a series of solutions to self-created problems.

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Our co-author on Effect Oriented Programming, Bill Frasure, joins us to chat about his programming journey and his involvement in last week's ZIO 2.0 release.

Book repo: https://github.com/EffectOrientedProgramming/book

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The Pants build tool is polyglot (Python, Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, etc) and focused on helping developers be more productive and happier.  We chat with a co-creator of Pants, Benjy Weinberger, about the history, motivations, and future of the build tool.

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Arty Starr is a PhD student and entrepreneur focused on helping developers thrive. We chat about her research on developer momentum and ways that developers can find joy through more time in the flow state.

Referenced resources:

• SpringOne Talk
• Arty's Idea Flow Book
• FlowInsight

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We chat with Venkat about his upcoming dev2next conference and the new Stream Gatherers API (preview in JDK 22).

Discuss this episode: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠discord.gg/XVKD2uPKyF

Special guest Oli joins us to chat about Recursion Schemes, tech conferences, podcasts, and kindness.

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Hope you all have a happy & healthy holiday!

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James is a Dynamic Programming Language Denier but realizes only a part of his code is actually statically typed. And programming languages so full of quirks that you have to hold the quick reference book in your teeth.

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Simon Vergauwen shares about Arrow, a collection of Functional Programming libraries for Kotlin.  Sincere apologies for Bruce & James' bad audio.  We forgot to change our input device but figured we'd still publish this as it is tolerable and Simon has so much good stuff to say.  (His audio is great)

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Tonya Moore has been helping build developer communities for years. We discuss how to deal with jerks and the importance of building on a foundation of compassion.

Referenced blog from Bill Venners: https://www.artima.com/articles/compassion-in-our-community

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We chat with Alexander Ioffe, maintainer of the Quill library, about database access approaches and Scala metaprogramming.

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James officially launches his crusade against custom declarative languages and then we bike-shed about bike-shedding; exploring ways to make decisions for trivial problems.

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We explore with Matt Anger a blog he wrote about migrating from Python to Kotlin and the trade offs engineering teams make when deciding which technologies to use.

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