Equational

Have you ever asked yourself the question of why database tables do not have two primary keys? Or maybe you have started a spreadsheet with a choice of columns and rows to only change them later? One of the little understood properties of programming is that at the lowest level things tend to be single dimensional. So for example, the balanced tree has just one key, and so on. There is theoretical reason for this, but the general fact is that it is much easier to design a structure or algorithm to do one thing than to do two or more. Object orientation starts with the fundamental idea that objects can do many things. And this naturally leads to the expectation that they can do them equality well. We know from the previous paragraph that this is not true, and yet many do not know this or forget it. You would think that this mismatch between expectation and reality is not really a big problem, yet sadly it is. OO programmers are constantly trying to fit multiple dimensio...

A few years back I read that a guy killed a child with his Ferrari: he missed the turn after a strong acceleration (as he left a Ferrari gathering!). And then more recently I read the same type of story, again with a Ferrari and an uncontrolled turn at an intersection. Well, F# is like a Ferrari (maybe that is what the F stands for ;-) ). It is incredibly more productive than the classical OO .net languages; see it as a language with an incredible acceleration. But the caveat is that programming in a functional language is much more of a balancing act, and therefore beware the slippery turns and “intellectual crashes”. This is especially a management and team issue, a language like F# allows you to blend in the same code concepts that can be dealt by your “standard” developer and concepts that take years to master. (It can be even worse than C++ template meta-programming.) If you were going to set up a taxi company would you buy a fleet of Ferraris if they were available at the sam...