When Java was created, the concept of operator overloading was already present in C++. I would say that it was generally well done in C++, but it kind of breaks the object oriented polymorphism patterns of C++ and the usual way was to have several overloaded functions to allow for all n² combinations.

In the early days of C++ people jumped on this feature and used it for all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with the original concept of numeric operators, like adding dialog boxes to strings and multiplying that with events. We get somewhere a little bit towards what APL was, which had only operators and a special charset to allow for all the language features, requiring even a special keyboard:

APL example

You can find an article in Scott Locklin’s Blog about APL and other almost forgotten languages and the potential loss of some achievements that they tried to bring to us.

We see the same with some people in Scala who create a lot of operators using interesting Unicode characters. This is not necessarily wrong, but I think operators should only be used for something that is really important. Not in the sense: „I wrote functionality XYZ for library UVW, and this is really important“, but in the sense that this functionality is so commonly used that people have no problem remembering the operator. Or the operator is already known to us, like „+“, „-„, „*“, … for numeric types, but I still have no idea what adding a string to an event would mean.

In C++ it got even worse because it was possible to overload „->“ or new and thus digging deep into the language, which can be interesting when used carefully and skillfully by developers who really know what they are doing, but disastrous otherwise.

Now Java has opted not to support this operator overloading, which was wrong in even at that time, but understandable, because at that time we were still more in the mindset to count bits and live with the deficiencies of int and long and we ware also seeing the weird abuses of operator overloading in C++. Maybe it was also the lack of time to design a sound mechanism for this in Java. Unfortunately this decision that was made in a context more than 20 years ago has kind of become religious. Interestingly James Gosling, when asked in an interview for the 20 years anniversary of Java, mentioned operator overloading for numeric types as the first thing that he would have made better. (It is around minute 9.) So I hope that this undoes the religious aspect of this topic.

An interesting idea will probably be included in future versions of Scala. An operator is in principal defined as a method of the left operand, which is quite logical, but it would imply writing something like e = (a.*(b)).+(c.*(d)), possibly with fewer parentheses. Now this is recognized as a operator-method, so the dots can go away as well as the parentheses and the common operator precedence applies, so e = a * b + c * d works as well and is what we find natural. Ruby and Scala are very similar in this aspect. Now some future version of Scala, maybe Scala 3, will introduce an annotation that allows the „infix“-notation for these methods and that adds a descriptive name. Now error messages and even IDE-support could give us access to the descriptive name and we would be able to search for it, while searching for something like „+“ or „-“ or „*“ would not really be helpful. I think that this idea would be useful for other languages as well.

These examples demonstrate the BigInteger types of Java, C#, Scala, Clojure and Ruby, respectively:

import java.math.BigInteger;

public class JavaBigInt {

public static void main(String[] args) {
BigInteger f = BigInteger.valueOf(2_000_000_000L);
BigInteger p = BigInteger.ONE;
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
System.out.println(i + " " +  p);
p = p.multiply(f);
}
}
}


gives this output:

0 1
1 2000000000
2 4000000000000000000
3 8000000000000000000000000000
4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000
5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
6 64000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
7 128000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


And the C#-version

using System;
using System.Numerics;

public class CsInt {

public static void Main(string[] args) {
BigInteger f = 2000000000;
BigInteger p = 1;
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
Console.WriteLine(i + " " +  p);
p *= f;
}
}
}


give exactly the same output:

0 1
1 2000000000
2 4000000000000000000
3 8000000000000000000000000000
4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000
5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
6 64000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
7 128000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


Or the Scala version

object ScalaBigInt {

def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
val f : BigInt = 2000000000;
var p : BigInt = 1;
for (i  <- 0 until 8) {
println(i + " " + p);
p *= f;
}
}
}

0 1
1 2000000000
2 4000000000000000000
3 8000000000000000000000000000
4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000
5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
6 64000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
7 128000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


Or in Clojure it looks like this, slightly shorter than then Java and C#:

(reduce (fn [x y] (println y x) (*' 2000000000 x)) 1 (range 8))


with the same output again, but a much shorter program. Please observe that the multiplication needs to use the "*'" instead of "*" in order to outexpand from fixed length integers to big-integers.

0 1
1 2000000000
2 4000000000000000000
3 8000000000000000000000000000N
4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000N
5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000N
6 64000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000N
7 128000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000N


Or in Ruby it is also quite short:

f = 2000000000
p = 1
8.times do |i|
puts "#{i} #{p}"
p *= f;
end


same result, without any special effort, because integers are always expanding to the needed size:

0 1
1 2000000000
2 4000000000000000000
3 8000000000000000000000000000
4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000
5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
6 64000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
7 128000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000


So I suggest to leave the IT-theology behind. So the pragmatic issues should be considered now.

In Java we have primitive numeric types, that are basically inadequate for application development, because they tacitly overflow and because application developers have usually no idea how to deal with rounding issues of float and double. We have good numeric types like BigInteger and BigDecimal to support arbitrarily long integral numbers, which do not overflow unless we exceed memory or addressaility issues with numbers of several billion digits. BigDecimal allows for controlled rounding, and also arbitrary precision.

Now we have to write
 e = a.multiply(b).add(c.multiply(d)) 
 e = a * b + c * d 
The latter is readable, it is exactly what we mean. The former is not readable at all and the likelihood of making mistakes is very high.
I would be happy with something like this:
 e = a (*) b (+) c (*) d 
where overloaded operators are surrounded with () or [] or something like that.

At some point of time a major producer of electronic calculators made us believe that it is more natural to express it like this
 e a b * c d * + = 
Maybe this way of writing math would be better, but it is not what we do outside of our computers and calculators. At least it was more natural to have this pattern for those who created the calculators, because it was much easier to implement in a clean way on limited hardware. We still have the opposite in Lisp, which is still quite alive as Clojure, so I use the Clojure syntax:
 (def x (+ (* a b) (* c d))) 
which is relatively readable after some learning and allows for a very simple and regular and powerful syntax. But even this is not how we write Math outside of our computer.

Btw., please use elementary school math skills and do not write
 e = (a * b) + (c * d) 
That is just noise. I do not recommend to memorize all the 10 to 25 levels of operator precedence of a typical programming languages, but it is good to know the basic ones, that almost any serious current programming language supports:
* binary * /
* binary + -
* == != <= >= < >
* &&
* ||
Some use "and" and "or" instead of "&&" and "||".

Now using overloaded operators should be no problem.

We do have an issue when implementing it.

Imagine you have a language with five built in numeric types. Now you add a sixth one. "+" is probably already defined for 25 combinations. With the sixth type we get a total of 36 combinations, of which we have to provide the missing 11 and a mechanism to dispatch the program flow to these. In C++ we just add 11 operator-functions and that does everything. In Ruby we add a method for the left side of the operator. Now this does not know our new type for the existing types, but it deals with it by calling coerce of the right operand with the left operand as parameter. This is actually powerful enough to deal with this situation.

It gets even more tricky when we use different libraries that do not know of each other and each of them adds numeric types. Possibly we cannot add these with each other or we can do so in a degraded manner by just falling back to double or float or rational or something like that.

The numeric types that we usually use can be added with each other, but we could hit situations where that is not the case, for example when having p-adic numbers, which can be added with rational number, but not with real numbers. Or finite fields, whose members can be added with integral numbers or with numbers of the same field, but not necessarily with numbers of another finite field. Fortunately these issues should occur only to people who understand them while writing libraries. Using the libraries should not be hard, if they are properly done.

# Laziness

In conservative circles, laziness has a slightly negative connotation, but in IT it should be seen positive, if we understand it right. If we as humans get our job done in a more efficient way, by working less, this laziness is a good thing. So let’s be lazy by becoming more efficient. For now, just remember, that laziness is something good.

Laziness in software refers to performing a certain operation only when needed. Imagine we store a value that is the result of some calculation in a data structure. We can only have read access to this value, speaking in the Java-world it is a „getter“. Under certain circumstances it is functionally equivalent to store the function that calculates the value instead and to call it whenever the getter is called. Usually this is combined with the memoize pattern, so the value is retained, once it has been calculated. This whole idea breaks down if the function to calculate the value has side effects, is influenced by side effects or generally does not yield the same result on the same inputs whenever it is called. Obviously for implementing such a lazy value the parameters for the function have to be retained as well, either by storing them in the structure as well or by wrapping the function and the parameters into a parameter-less function that includes them. Obviously these parameters have to be immutable for this approach to work.

Now the question is, what do we gain from this kind of laziness?
At first glance we gain nothing, because the calculation has to be done anyway and we are just procrastinating it, so the eventual calculation of whatever we are doing will be expensive. Actually this might not be true. It is quite possible, that the value is never needed, so it would be wasteful to calculate it in advance.

Actually many of us have seen both approaches in text books for Java or C++, when the singleton pattern is explained. The typical implementation looks like this:

 public class S {     private static S instance = null;

     public static synchronized S getInstance() {         if (instance == null) {             instance = new S();         }         return instance;     }     public S() {         // ...     } 

    //... } 

This „synchronized“ is a bit of a pain, but necessary to ensure that the instance is created only once. Smart people came up with the „double-check-pattern“, so it looked like this:
 public class S {     private static S instance = null;

     public static S getInstance() {         if (instance == null) {             synchronized (S.class) {                 if (instance == null) {                     instance = new S();                 }             }         }         return instance;     }     public S() {         // ...     } 

    //... } 

It is kind of cute, because it takes into account that after the first check and before acquiring the synchronized-lock some other thread already initializes it. It is supposed to work with newer Java versions, but for sure going to fail in older versions. This is due to the memory management model. Anyway it is kind of scary, because we observe that something that really looks correct won’t work anyway. Or even worse, it will work fine during testing and miserably fail on production when we don’t expect it. But it would be so easy with eager initialization:
 public class S {     private static S instance = new S();

     public static S getInstance() {         return instance;     }     public S() {         // ...     } 

    //... } 
Or use even an enum to implement the singleton.

Other language like Scala support this kind of laziness in a more natural way.
 case class S(s : String) {   lazy val t : String = (s + s);   def tt() : String = { t } } 
In this case t would be calculated when tt is called the first time.

In this example it does not help a lot, because the calculation of t is so cheap. But imagine we wanted to create a huge collection and then start doing something with the elements until we reach a certain goal. Eagerly initializing the collection would blow up our program, but we may be able to iterate through it or work with the first elements where is significantly smaller than the size of the collection would be. Just think of it as an iterate-only-collection or as a collection that is too big to keep it in memory completely.

Just do this in Clojure:
 (def r (range 1000000000000N)) 
It would define a collection with elements, which would most likely exceed our memory. But it is accepted and we can do stuff with it as long as we are dealing only with elements near to the beginning. It could know its size, but it does not, so
 (count r) 
will fail or take forever. Or maybe work in some future version of Clojure…

So laziness allows us to write more elegant, expressive programs that have a good efficiency. Off course this can all be written by ourselves without such help, but it is a good laziness to rely on programming languages, libraries or tools that allow us to do it in such an elegant way.

Now we can find out that Hibernate and JPA use some kind of laziness. They have to, because objects tend to be connected and fetching one would require to fetch a really big bunch. Unfortunately the laziness is simply not correct, because we do have side effects, that influence the outcome. That is what databases are… So data may change, transactions may have been committed or rolled back or whatever. We get „LazyLoadingException“, when we try to access some data. And when we try to adopt a beautiful programming style that mimics functional patters in Java with non-static inner classes (prior to Java 8) in conjunction with Hibernate, it will be bound to fail miserably unless we apply absolute care about this issue.

While we are always moving on thin ice with this side-effect-dependent laziness of Hibernate and JPA, it will be really powerful in functional languages like Scala, Clojure or Haskell if we are going the extra mile to ensure that the function does not have side effects and does not depend on side effects or get influenced by side effects.

# Slick

Almost every serious programming language has to deal with database access, if not out of love, then at least out of practical necessity.

The theoretical background of a functional programming language is somewhat hostile to this, because pure functional langauges tend to dislike state and a database has the exact purpose to preserve state for a long time. Treating the database as somewhat external and describing its access with monads will at least please theoretical purists to some extent.

In case of Scala things are not so strict, it is allowed to leave the purely functional path where adequate. But there are reasons to follow it and to leave it only in well defined, well known, well understood and well contained exceptions… So the database itself may be acceptable.

Another intellectual and practical challenge is the fact that modern Scala architectures like to be reactive, like to uncouple things, become asynchronous. This is possible with databases, but it is very unusual for database drivers to support this. And it is actually quite contrary to the philosophy of database transactions. It can be addressed with future database drivers, but I do not expect this to be easy to use properly in conjunction with transactions.

It is worthwhile to think about
immutability and databases.
For now we can assume that the database is there and can be used.

So the question is, why not integrate existing and established persistence frameworks like JPA, Hibernate, Eclipslink and other OR-mapping-based systems into Scala, with Scala language binding?

Actually I am quite happy they did not go this path. Hibernate is broken and buggy, but the generic concept behind it is broken in my opinion. I do not think that it is theoretically correct, especially if we should program with waterproof transactions and actually defeat them by JPA-caching without even being aware of it? But for practical purposes, I actually doubt that taming JPA for non trivial applications is really easier than good old JDBC.

Anyway, Scala took the approach of building something in the lines of JDBC, but making it nicer. It is called Slick, currently Slick 3. Some links:
* Slick
* Slick 3.1.1
* Documentation
* Github
* Assynchronous DB access
* Recording of the Slick Workshop at ScalaX

What Slick basically does is building queries using Scala language. It does pack the results into Scala structures. Important is, that the DB is not hidden. So we just do the same as with JDBC, but in a more advanced way.

# How to create ISO Date String

It is a more and more common task that we need to have a date or maybe date with time as String.

There are two reasonable ways to do this:
* We may want the date formatted in the users Locale, whatever that is.
* We want to use a generic date format, that is for a broader audience or for usage in data exchange formats, log files etc.

The first issue is interesting, because it is not always trivial to teach the software to get the right locale and to use it properly… The mechanisms are there and they are often used correctly, but more often this is just working fine for the locale that the software developers where asked to support.

So now the question is, how do we get the ISO-date of today in different environments.

## Linux/Unix-Shell (bash, tcsh, …)

date "+%F"

## TeX/LaTeX

 \def\dayiso{\ifcase\day \or 01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or% 1..10 11\or 12\or 13\or 14\or 15\or 16\or 17\or 18\or 19\or 20\or% 11..20 21\or 22\or 23\or 24\or 25\or 26\or 27\or 28\or 29\or 30\or% 21..30 31\fi} \def\monthiso{\ifcase\month \or 01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or 11\or 12\fi} \def\dateiso{\def\today{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso}} \def\todayiso{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso} 
This can go into a file isodate.sty which can then be included by \include or \input Then using \todayiso in your TeX document will use the current date. To be more precise, it is the date when TeX or LaTeX is called to process the file. This is what I use for my paper letters.

## LaTeX

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):
 \usepackage{isodate} % load package \isodate % switch to ISO format \today % print date according to current format 

## Oracle

 SELECT TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'YYYY-MM-DD') FROM DUAL; 
On Oracle Docs this function is documented.
It can be chosen as a default using ALTER SESSION for the whole session. Or in SQL-developer it can be configured. Then it is ok to just call
 SELECT SYSDATE FROM DUAL; 

Btw. Oracle allows to add numbers to dates. These are days. Use fractions of a day to add hours or minutes.

## PostreSQL

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment):
 select current_date; —> 2016-01-08 
 select now(); —> 2016-01-08 14:37:55.701079+01 

## Emacs

In Emacs I like to have the current Date immediately:
 (defun insert-current-date () "inserts the current date" (interactive) (insert (let ((x (current-time-string))) (concat (substring x 20 24) "-" (cdr (assoc (substring x 4 7) cmode-month-alist)) "-" (let ((y (substring x 8 9))) (if (string= y " ") "0" y)) (substring x 9 10))))) (global-set-key [S-f5] 'insert-current-date) 
Pressing Shift-F5 will put the current date into the cursor position, mostly as if it had been typed.

## Emacs (better Variant)

(From Thomas, see his comment below):
 (defun insert-current-date () "Insert current date." (interactive) (insert (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d"))) 

## Perl

In the Perl programming language we can use a command line call
 perl -e 'use POSIX qw/strftime/;print strftime("%F", localtime()), "\n"' 
or to use it in larger programms

# Slick: Bringing Scala’s Powerful Features to Your Database Access

## Rebecca Grenier

Slick is a library that generates and executes SQL queries. The conceptional weaknesses of JPA and Hibernate are avoided.
It has drivers for the five major DBs (PostgreSQL, mySQL/mariaDB, Oracle, MS-SQL-Server and DB2) and some minor DBs, but it is not free for the three commercial DBs.
Inner and outer joins are possible and can be written in a decent way.
With database dictionaries slick is now even able to generate code. Which I have done, btw. a lot using Perl scripts running on the DDL-SQL-script. But this is better, off course…

# Upcoming in Slick 2.2

## Jan Christopher Vogt

Monads haunt us everywhere, even here. Time to learn what they are. I will be giving a talk in the Ruby-on-Rails user group in Zürich, which will force me to learn it.
Sessions in conjunction with futures are the best guarantee for all kinds of nightmares, because the SQL is sometimes executed when the session is no longer valid or the transaction is already over. When dealing with transactional databases a lot of cool programming patterns become harder. Just think of the cool java guys who execute stuff by letting a EJB-method return an instance of an inner class with the DB-session implicitely included there and calling a method which via JPA indirectly and implicitely does DB-access long after the EJB-method is over. Have fun when debugging this stuff. But we know about it and address it here.
At least Slick is theoretically correct, other than JPA which I conject to be theoretically incorrect, apart from the shortcomings of the concrete implementations.
Several statements can be combined with andThen or a for-comprehension. Be careful, by default this uses separate sessions and transactions, with very funny effects. But threads and sessions are expensive and must not be withheld during non-running non-SQL-activities by default. Reactiveness is so important. Futures and thread pools look promising, but this fails miserably when we have blocking operations involved, that will occupy our threads for nothing.
We would like to have assynchronous SQL-access, which can be done on DB- and OS-level, but JDBC cannot. So we have to work around on top of JDBC. Apart from using a reasonably low number of additional threads this approach seems to be viable.
Statically type checked SQL becomes possible in the future.

# No more Regular Expressions

## Phil Wills

I love the regex of Perl. Really. So why do effort to give up something so cool, even in non-perl-languages?
It is not as bad as it sounds. We retain regular expressions as a concept, just do not call them like that (for marketing reasons I assume) and write them differently. Writing them as strings between // is very natural in Perl, but it breaks the flow of the language in Scala. A typical programmatical scala-like approach is more natural and more type safe. And more robust in case of errors. org.paraboiled2 can be used. Capture is unfortunately positional, unlike in newer Perl-regex, where captures can be named. But it hurts less here.

# Scala eXchange – Q&A Panel

## Jon Pretty, Kingsley Davies, Lars Hupel, Martin Odersky, and Miles Sabin

Interesting discussions…

# Why Scala is Taking Over the Big Data World

## Dean Wampler

‚“Hadoop“ is the „EJB“ of our time.‘
MapReduce is conceptionally already functional programming. So why use Java and not Scala?
Some keywords: „Scalding“, „Storm“, „Summing bird“, „Spark“.
Scala can be more performant than python, which is so popular in this area, but migration has to be done carefully.

# Case classes a la carte with shapeless, now!

## Miles Sabin

Example: tree structure with backlinks. Hard to do in strict immutabilty. Shapeless helps.

# Reactive Programming with Algebra

## André Van Delft

Algebra can be fun and useful for programming. Algebraic interpretations were introduced.
Page is subscript-lang.org.
Algebra of communicationg processes. It is very powerful and can even be applied to other targets, for example operation of railroad systems.
Every program that deals with inpout is in its way a parser. So ideas from yacc and bison apply to them.

# High Performance Linear Algebra in Scala

## Sam Halliday

Lineare Algebra has been addressed extremely well already, so the wheel should not be reinvented.
TL;D, Netflix and Breeze.
Example for usage of that stuff: Kalman Filter.
netlib has reference implementation in Fortran, a well defined interface and a reliable set of automatic tests. How do we take this into the scala world?
Fortran with C-Wrapper for JNI. (cblas)
compile Fortran to Java. really.
Alternate implementations of the same test suite in C.
High-Performance is not only about speed and memory alone, but about those under the given requirements concerning correctness, precision and stability.
Hardware is very interesting. The CPU-manufacturers are talking with the netlib team.
Can GPU be used? Off course, but some difficulties are involved, for example transfer of data.
FPGA? maybe soon? Or something like GPU, without graphics and operating on the normal RAM?
We will see such stuff working in the future.

# An invitation to functional programming

## Rúnar Bjarnason

Referential transparency, something like compatibility with the memoize pattern.
Pure functions…
Parallelization..
Comprehensiveness.. The all time promise, will it be kept this time?
Functional programming is not good for the trenches of real life project, but for getting out of the trenches. This should be our dream. Make love not war, get rid of trenches…

# Building a Secure Distributed Social Web using Scala & Scala-JS

## Henry Story

Spargl is like SQL for the „semantic web“.
Developed with support from Oracle.
We can have relativiity of of truth while retaining the absolute truth. The speech was quite philosophical, in a good way.
Graphs can be isomorphic, but have a different level of trust, depending on where the copy lies.
How is spam and abuse avoided? WebID?
We are not dealing with „Big Data“ but with massively parallel and distributed „small data“.

# TableDiff – a library for showing the difference between the data in 2 tables

## Sue Carter

What is the right semantics for a diff?
What do we want to see? How are numbers and strings compared when occurring in fields?
Leave timestamps that obviously differ but do not carry much information out.

# Evolving Identifiers and Total Maps

## Patrick Premont

Idea is to have a map where get always returns something non-null. Smart type concepts avoid the compilation of a get call that would not return something.
Very interesting idea, but I find it more useful as theoretical concept rather than for practical purposes. The overhead seems to be big.

# Summary

Overall it was a great conference.

# Scala Exchange 2013

Deutsch

I have visited the conference ScalaX 2013 in London on the beginning of December.

It was really fun. The talks were quite challenging, maybe even a little bit more than on other conferences I have visited, but that was really fun to listen to. About 400 participants were there and three tracks were available. So it was possible to learn a lot about advanced concepts in functional programming and software architecture with a focus on Scala, but also some Haskell and Clojure.

Some interesting talks were: