Friday, February 2, 2007

A case of case

In all the documentation I have seen on Smalltalk, everyone always points out how to use #ifTrue:ifFalse and why it works this way. Ok, got it. But at some point, one needs more branching control then just if/else.

Now I know; anytime you branch you could accomplish the same thing using method overriding [1], but it isn't always practicle to break out a new class for a one time thing. This is the reason there is a #ifTrue:ifFalse in the first place, no doubt.

But what we can learn from #ifTrue:ifFalse is, if there is something the language doesn't provide that you need, just put it in. :) I was writting a complicated function some time back where I ran into just this case. I was having to nest if statements, but the problem was, each condition was complex. So several of the conditions had to be repeated in different if statements. Obvious code smell. "If only I Smalltalk had case!" I thought. Wait a minute, why don't I just write one? I didn't handle the general case, I just made a method that handled my specific case.

onFirstComplexCase: aFirstBlock orSecond: aSecondBlock else: aLastBlock

Of course using this method instantly made a 20 line [2], complicated and thus, unclear method into a short, very readable one. And then today, while tracking something else in the Object class I found that someone else thought of this first and did the more general solution. :)

caseOf: anAssociationCollection otherwise: aFailBlock

anAssociationCollection associationsDo: [:assoc|
assoc key value = self ifTrue: [ ^ assoc value ]
].
aFailBlock value.

Very nice. This lets us do something like:

event
caseOf: {
[ #clicked ] -> [ self handleClick ].
[ #resized ] -> [ self handleResize ].
" ... "
}
otherwise: [ self error: 'unknown event: ', event asString ]

Very cool. It looks like an ML style caseOf statement. But this still doesn't handle my case does it? My cases are much more complicated then just comparing a class to something. You have, no doubt, figured this out, but just in case; how does the case method work again? It evaluates the key and compares that result to the recieving object. So if we have a more complicated case we could just go:

true
caseOf: {
[ self hasThisTrait and: [ Date today month = 12 ] ] -> [ self goCrazy ]
" ... "
}
otherwise: [ self error: 'logic error' ]

[1] An if statement basically creates a branch in execution. This can also be done with a class hierarchy and method overloading (and in fact this is how the boolean hierarchy works in smalltalk).

[2] In Smalltalk, if your method gets over 5-10 lines it is time to start looking at some refactoring. I didn't completely believe them initially when they told me, but so far it has been the case nearly every time.

Watching the watchmen

Talk of monitoring tools today got me to thinking.

Back in my C/C++ days, efficiency was my main concern. I wanted things to go as fast as possible. So I couldn't be spending instructions to do things like logging, monitoring my own performance, etc. And my code isn't going to crash anyway, so what's the point, right? Wrong. Of course my system was perfect :), but it talked to other systems that weren't. This meant my programs just didn't seem to do anything. We were completely flying blind since there was no indication of any sort of what it was doing. That was always the main push of my manager at the team (to all of us, not just me): make the systems better at monitoring themselves.

Fast forward a few years and I am in a meeting hearing about monitoring tools that will be able to tell us things we need to know this time. This got me thinking about the nature of this beast. When you write a tool, you are putting in extra code to expose a part of your system. A different interface, or view :) then the normal. You have to, first, guess what might be a problem area so that you can write the interfaces to show it. But, as was implicitly mentioned in this meeting, you are often wrong in your guess about this. Or at least you don't expose enough.

Our systems use the popular *4log libraries to handle logging via configuration. What most programmers do with this is put a log message at the start and end of every (!!!) function. So if you turn on debugging you will literally see every single call the system makes. Is there no better way to do this?

I think there is. In smalltalk, a live system, I can view any part of the code any time I want. This is a good thing, but it was the first thing I saw as a negative when I started using smalltalk. So inefficient with so much of the system exposed! But is it? It has reflection, a way for us to use the system to ask the system things about itself. It's not some hack and it's not something you can "turn off" for production. It is part of it from top to bottom. It also has viewers that are designed to use this reflection to show us parts of the system. While it's running.

So if you think about it, they did the same thing my manager ask me to do years ago, and the same thing the developers at my company are trying to do now: they are giving ways to monitor the system. But the difference is, instead of guessing which parts of the system might have problems that we need to look at, they just gave us the whole thing.

As far as efficiency, sure, raw C++ (and even Java) may be more performant then raw smalltalk. But if end the end you wind up doing things like calling two logging functions per normal function, every time, then how much more efficient is your code? After all, Smalltalk isn't calling into the viewers for every function. Only if you use them. And you never have to go back and add new monitoring tools because you guessed wrong.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

The world from 60,000 feet

Well, I haven't gotten involved in this whole blog thing up until now but... well... why not.

This blog is probably going to mostly be about high level programming languages. I think the tide is slowly starting to shift toward higher level, more productive programming languages.

I know it has for me. I was a Perl programmer for more then half a decade, but I always hated that language. My favorite language at the time was C++. It was syntax I knew from C, but it was the most powerful language I had seen yet. You could change and add to the language! This is what drew me to it. Power.

About 6 months ago I got back into programming a bit and started looking around. A new friend had ask me to take over his web site. He is pretty talented at graphical stuff, but running a web site always winds up involving technical details that he didn't feel comfortable doing. And since I "do computers" he figured I wouldn't mind taking it.

But the fact is I always hated web programming. Stateless programming, templates, etc. I just didn't like it at all. But looking around something caught my eye: a little web framework called "Seaside".

Now the last I heard, PHP was the king of web programming and PHP was similar to Perl. Not to mention a heavy user of templates. So I wasn't interested at that at all. But this Seaside thing was talked about like it was quite the big deal, so I took a look.

They had this little counter, just a 0 with a ++ and -- under it. When you click on one of those you affect the number. At first I was pretty underwhelmed, but I clicked the button for "show source code". Now I didn't know anything at all about smalltalk, but I saw something that really grabbed my attention.

All the code did was update the object. No stuffing variables into some hidden field, writing files, none of that. Just updates and object and nothing more. I read everything on the site, just to see how they did this, so I could steal, er, use it for whatever system I made. But the more I looked, the more crazy it got.

So I downloaded Smalltalk, it wasn't that intimidating. Just download a file, click it and it runs. No installer menu filling my registry with God knows what. Just a nice little executable like 'putty' (an SSH tool).

Gradually, my love for C++ slipped away. Replaced with something new. A language that was even more powerful, but at the same time much simpler. C++ gained some of it's power allowing you to override what a given operator means for certain classes. Since smalltalk is written in itself, it goes so much further. All the control statements are written in the language, and thus accessible to the coder. Or you can write your own.

The other big thing was this concept of a "live" system. A Perl system I wrote way back when had to do some operations on a very large number of network devices. Unfortunately, at close to device 59,000 something bad happened. A bug. Rather then try to guess what was happening and do some logging, I just ran the whole system in the debugger. The system normally took 6 hours to run. In the debugger, running single threaded, it was much more then that. This meant I got 1 chance per day to try and figure out what the problem was. But with logging it would have been the same.

Finally, after about the 3rd or 4th day I found it. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that I had a fix in about 30 seconds after seeing what was going on. But the problem is, the devices behind this one had not been backed up for some time now and some people were getting more then a little excited about this. But I only had a couple of thousand devices to go, why not just start from here?

Well, because I couldn't. There was nothing I would be able to do from inside the debugger to convince the program to go on from this point, and starting again meant waiting another day. Obviously it wasn't a huge deal, or I could have written a little "one off" to touch the untouched devices (and maybe I even did, I don't remember). But it was something I wished I could have done, but something like that is just impossible. Or is it?

Not with Smalltalk (or Lisp as it turns out). In Smalltalk, I sometimes write portions of the code from the debugger, since this is the best place to get instant feedback of what the code is doing.

I will talk more about this later, perhaps. But let me just finish with, going to smalltalk has also peaked my interest in other high level languages as well. I am looking at Haskell (incredible language as well, and possibly the most terse there is) as well, and keep turning my head toward Erlang, but I haven't bit quite yet.