A Paradox of Braces

A great deal of thought goes into language design. Eric Lippert’s posts is a living testament, at least for C#. Syntax and idioms are also part of the language design. When designing a language, the designers have to also consider its future. For instance, when designing C#, Anders and others should have thought of and planned for what’s coming in then upcoming version(s) of C#. Such level of forethought might be seem daunting for an outsider. But the language designers are good at what they do, and most importantly, they know what they are doing. Well, in most cases!

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JS Programming in C# – Local Functions

Functional programs treat functions and data alike. No discrimination, if you will. That means, you can declare and use functions – assign to variables, pass to other functions etc., the same way you would play with variables.

A canonical example of a functional program would show how to pass functions as parameters to other functions (higher order functions). It would also show how one can create functions on the fly (lambdas or anonymous functions) and also assign it to a variable, which is of a predefined function type; either the compiler deduces or aligns to the calling context.

There is one important attribute of data that is mostly forgotten. It can be declared almost anywhere, particularly within functions. Local variables, remember? If we agree to treat data and functions alike then we should be able to declare a function inside another. Errrk! Why would anyone want to do that? Seems like JavaScript.

My Take on Picking a Log Level

Logging? What’s there to talk about logging? It’s straightforward. Use the one of the log levels and log it.

The ubiquitous log4j‘s website says …

ERROR level designates error events that might still allow the application to continue running

FATAL level designates very severe error events that will presumably lead the application to abort

INFO level designates informational messages that highlight the progress of the application at coarse-grained level

WARN level designates potentially harmful situations

That is the theory of it. Let me tell you my opinion on a more practical matter.

JS Programming in C# – Objects on the fly

Creating objects without defining types is considered a great flexibility in JavaScript. JavaScript treats objects nothing more than key-value pairs. Yeah, you can declare functions in the object but they are still part of the key-value philosophy. Bottomline: JavaScript did not start out as an object oriented language.

Typically, objects are created on the fly¹ using the object literal syntax:

let obj = {
   name: "Will",
   age: 26
};

There are scenarios when creating objects on the fly is indeed a flexibility.

Lo and Behold

A few days back, I published an article Lo and Behold here on my blog, and also publicized on Medium and LinkedIn.

The article, inspired by Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold, is my opinion on one of the anecdotes (Robots that are being designed to beat Messi).

Does the anecdote grab your attention? Then you should find my article interesting.

Let me know what you think.

Writing sonnets in C++

Recently, I came across this post – Write a URL in a C++ program, one of those C’s tricks. If you have not already read the post, I will wait until you read and return …

Waiting …

The crux of the trick is the protocol part of the URL – http:, becomes a goto label and the rest of the URL starting with // becomes a comment. Sweet 🤗

My turn …

Compiler aided overloading

I was playing with xUnit.net for a pet project of mine. I wasn’t writing test cases with xUnit rather I was using the underlying xUnit engine to discover test cases and invoke calls that execute desired test cases. Forget the details of what I was doing, let us talk about it in a different post. But for now, I was consuming xUnit’s backend library.

XunitFrontController is the gateway to xUnit’s world; AFAIK. You create an instance of the controller specifying the target assembly.

var xfc = new XunitFrontController(
  AppDomainSupport.IfAvailable,
  "{full path of the assembly where the test cases reside}"
);