Category: Misc Languages

Mat Hayward-Hill gives us another language to think about:

Right now I spend most of my time in Management Studio writing TSQL. And I use PowerShell whenever I need to do something on more than one machine at a time. But now Microsoft is embracing open source should I be thinking the same and learn a new language which isn’t so Microsoft-centric.

After talking to some experts, I narrowed the choice down to two; Python and Go (also referred to as Golang). I picked Golang as it’s relatively new (open sourced in 2009 but for a language is leading-edge, whereas Python dates back to the late 1980s); nothing more complicated than that as this project is just for fun!

I’d see this as more of a “Cool, I can do this now” type of language rather than a “Hey, drop what you’re doing and learn this!” language.  That may change over the next few years.

Amuda Adelou shows how to use Tesseract’s Java API to perform character recognition in images:

Extracting text from an image means that you are considering the flowchart imagery that’s processed to extract the text components and then extracting the geometrical shapes components. The text components are extracted with geometrical components, as well. The internal relationship between the components is set up by tracing the flow lines that connect different components. The extracted components are output to metadata (in XML format), which is machine-readable. This metadata can be archived, stored in a knowledge base, or shared with others.

Click through for a demo app and code.

Vladimir Khorikov has an example of removing shared state and making application code more “honest” as a result:

Note how we’ve removed the private fields. Getting rid of the shared state automatically decoupled the three methods and made the workflow explicit. Without the shared state, the only way we can carry data around is by using the methods’ arguments and return values. And that is exactly what we did: all three members now explicitly state required inputs and possible outputs in their signatures.

This is the essence of functional programming. With honest method signatures, it’s extremely easy to reason about the code as we don’t need to keep in mind hidden relationships between its different parts. It’s also impossible to mess up with the invocation order. If we try, for example, to put the second line above the first one, the code simply wouldn’t compile:

This is one of many reasons why I’m fond of functional programming.

Angshuman Talukdar shows how to use neo4j to solve minimum weighted distance problems:

A sample dataset is created in Neo4j using the CREATE clause in Cypher as given in Query 1 (create clause in Cypher). This loads the data into Neo4j and generates the graph database as shown in Figure 2.

Neo4j has a lot of graph algorithms shipped with it as a package and those are accessible only from the JAVA API. Implementing some of these algorithms in Cypher is quite complex and time consuming. From Neo4j 3.x, the concept of user defined procedures had been introduced called APOC (Awesome Procedures On Cypher). Those are custom implementations of certain functionality, that can’t be (easily) expressed in Cypher itself. The APOC library consists of many (about 300) procedures to help with many different tasks in areas like data integration, graph algorithms or data conversion.

Graph databases aren’t common, but they can be very useful for certain questions like the one Angshuman solves.