To Coin a Word

Tony makes Reddit again with a familiar term, Refunctoring.

Why ‘Refunctoring’? First, I refuse to reuse euphemistic terms that have served only to denigrate the standard of the software development industry, therefore, I cannot use ‘Refactoring’ (oooh! did I just say that!!?). To show this, consider the fact that the entire notion of ‘Refactoring’ is done away with one simple phrase ‘Functional Programming’ in the case shown and hundreds more. Of course, you might decide to redefine Refactoring to a different context, but then, redefining terms often leads to confusion (the term ‘function’ is itself a perfect example). To further demonstrate this point, open the book or catalog on Refactoring and turn to the section titled, ‘Replace Parameter with Method’. Then say out loud, ‘partial application’ — if you don’t know why you’re saying that, learn what partial application is, then perhaps it might dawn on you.

Anyway, Refunctoring is what most people really are doing. They are converting their code that is written in not-too-powerful programming languages to mimic the power that is already available in functional programming languages. They are representing higher-order functions with (importantly co-variant) polymorphic type parameters, refactoring out what partial application already provides and much more. This is being done, despite having been invented many, many years ago, but the fact that it is being done mandates a name, albeit how absurd it might be. I use the term Refunctoring, for no other reason than it was suggested to me by a bemused colleague (you know who you are :) ) one day and upon reflection, I have decided that it is entirely appropriate.

You don’t think the map function is a special case do you?

It's good to be known as bemused.

A Perfectly Functional Blog

So now I can get my fill of functional rants complete with how it is applicable to every possible situation, Tony Morris’ blog.

Update: The first bit of content is up now, "Have you ever wanted to do this?". Which is all about how easy it is to redeclare equality in Haskell vs Java or .NET.

When Garbage Collection isn't Enough

There is frequently an error that people make when allocating resources. Everyone seems to understand that you use a try/finally block but how to do it is usually unclear. Should you put all the resource deallocation in one finally block? How do you handle the exception that maybe thrown attempting to deallocate the resource?

I've previously advocated using a non-final assignment and then checking in the finally block if object is not null and then closing it. The better way is:

final Connection conn = ...;
try{
  ...
} finally {
  close(conn);
}

This idiom is detailed here. It gives reasons behind using this idiom and the rule of thumb: "place one "try-finally" directly after each resource allocated".

This was written in 2005 based on a previous Javalobby thread. I continue to see resource leaks caused by not closing resources correctly. I know of people who have made considerable money consulting to fix these kinds of bugs in large systems which I find fairly depressing.