Ruby Conf 12 - Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

What people said

AaronFriel · 2020-10 · Strong recommendation

A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essentially how you write good Haskell code, but in Ruby! A language that makes it so easy to mutate in place that it's known for libraries that "monkey patch" base classes and can change the definition of operators and functions at runtime! Fantastic talk, fantastic presentation. I now share it with my new engineering colleagues too. Here's the talk where he talks about imperative shell, functional core, "Boundaries": [VIDEO]

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dnautics · 2020-03 · Strong recommendation

> I find some problems are solved better in an OO way such as interacting with a relational database. I've switched to functional interactions with a database, (Elixir/Ecto) and really, it's much better. In particular the explicit and declarative nature of the database interactions combines the convenience of an ORM with "not hiding important gotchas from you". I'm not arguing for pure functional systems (which I can see going very poorly with relational databases). There are some things that objects are good at like caching state as a model. But even here the FP systems typically do it better via FP actors and (again, impure) message passing, which enforces no-shared memory, and at least in erlang virtual machine systems, couples segregated state with limiting blast radius for your systems failure domains, which is 150% the "right thing to do". Of course if we're getting pedantic, this is even close to OO the way that Alan Kay imagined it, than what the OP and GP talk about, and I don't consider that to be OO in the contemporary, colloquial sense of "everything that happened after Bjarne Soustroup invented C++" I highly recommend this video for a more philosophical take on how to do "impure FP" without OO that is informed by a decade of industry experience: [VIDEO] which is by Gary Bernhardt (of WAT fame) > I look for the right tool for the job rather than some idealistic purity This is all about right tool for the job. IMO, FP code is easier to read, easier to reason about,

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dnautics · 2020-01 · Strong recommendation

if you are a rubyist, I can't more strongly recommend watching this video, which has nothing to do directly with Elixir (in fact it precedes elixir by a couple of years) but if the topics that Bernhart (of wat fame) brings up resonate with you, then you will really like Elixir. [VIDEO]

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