Category: Misc Languages

Matthew Rathbone shows different concurrency options available in Scala:

Scala is a functional programming language that aims to avoid side effects by encouraging you to use immutable variables (called ‘values’), and data structures.

So by default in Scala when you build a list, array, string, or other object, that object is immutable and cannot be changed or updated.

This might seem unrelated, but think about a thread which has been given a list of strings to process, perhaps each string is a website that needs crawling.

In the Java model, this list might be updated by other threads at the same time (adding / removing websites), so you need to make sure you either have a thread-safe list, or you safeguard access to it with the protected keyword or a Mutex.

By default in Scala this list is immutable, so you can be sure that the list cannot be modified by other threads, because it cannot be modified at all.

While this does force you to program in different ways to work around the immutability, it does have the tremendous effect of simplifying thread-safety concerns. The value of this cannot be understated, it’s a huge burden to worry about thread safety all the time, but in Scala much of that burden goes away.

Read the whole thing if you’re looking at writing Spark applications in Scala.  If you’re thinking about functional programming in .NET languages, F# is  there for you.

Chris Koester has a quick-and-easy file reader in a few lines of C#:

This post describes one way that you can read the top N rows from large text files with C#. This is very useful when working with giant files that are too big to open, but you need to view a portion of them to determine the schema, data types, etc.

I’ve used PowerShell many times to do this with large csv files, but in this example we’re going to use C# and look at the Wikipedia XML dump of pages and articles. The 3017-03-01 dump is very large and comes in at 59.5 GB.

I’ve had to write something similar before on Windows machines where I didn’t have access to more/less.  It’s really helpful for perusing the first few lines of gigantic log files.

Bert Wagner shows a few easy things you can do to clean up C# code:

1. Clean up formatting

The overall format of your code is what makes it possible to quickly navigate to areas of interest. Consistent indentation, line breaks, and patterns help programmers skim large chunks of code. Take the following sloppily formatted code for example:

Read on for the rest.  This has analogues in every language:  the goal is to create simple, concise, easily scannable, and human-readable code which also correctly solves the relevant business problem.

Drew Furgiuele explains the process of contributing to an open source project, specifically dbatools:

Step 2: Check out the Github project page what’s in development.

Next, you should visit the project issues page. Here, you’ll find a list of all the features requested, in development and completed on the project. You can also filter the pages to look at current bugs or requested enhancements. Once you see what’s what, if you think of something you want to work on or help with, make a note of it. You should also look at examples of things in development and things that have been completed so you get an idea of the creative and technical process that goes into the project.

Step 3: Speak up!

Head on back to the Slack channel and let everyone know you want to help out. Someone (probably Chrissy) will add your Github account to to the project as a contributor so you can have things assigned to you. Congrats, you’re now on the hook!

I’m happy that the dbatools community has sprung up and hope it’s a gateway to further open source development in the SQL Server community.

Jay Robinson has a two-pronged tale:

This reminds me of an old saying: If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.*

Now, this is not a commentary on my current team. I work with some really smart people, and I’m very grateful for that. But while my teammate may be one of the best PHP or Node.js coders I know, that doesn’t necessarily translate to an expertise with the .NET Framework. The true test is this – no matter how smart they are, if they’re not catching my mistakes, then I’m not being held accountable.

There is some good advice here on threading (yes, definitely use the newer threading libraries), but also good advice on surrounding yourself with intelligent people who can catch your mistakes.

Eli Weinstock-Herman explains how to use Azure Functions to create dynamic content on an otherwise-static page:

My personal website is a static site: 100% HTML, JS, and CSS files with no server-side processing. I have custom code that pulls data from a variety of sources and builds updated versions of the files from templates, which are then deployed to the host. I do this to move the CPU latency of building the pages to my time, instead of charging it to visitors on each page hit. While I have a host, a strategy like this means I could also choose to host for free via github or similar services.

So there’s a great benefit to the reader and our wallet, but no server-side execution makes things like contact forms trickier. Luckily, Azure Functions or AWS Lambda can be used as a webhook to receive the form post and process it, costing nothing near nothing to use (AWS and Azure both offer a free tier for 1M requests/month and 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time).

Eli has a working example in the post, which I recommend checking out.