andymatuschak

A composable pattern for pure state machines with effects

State machines are everywhere in interactive systems, but they're rarely defined clearly and explicitly. Given some big blob of code including implicit state machines, which transitions are possible and under what conditions? What effects take place on what transitions?

There are existing design patterns for state machines, but all the patterns I've seen complect side effects with the structure of the state machine itself. Instances of these patterns are difficult to test without mocking, and they end up with more dependencies. Worse, the classic patterns compose poorly: hierarchical state machines are typically not straightforward extensions. The functional programming world has solutions, but they don't transpose neatly enough to be broadly usable in mainstream languages.

Here I present a composable pattern for pure state machiness with effects,

chriseidhof

import UIKit

// If you enjoyed this talk (video link will be up soon), then you might also enjoy our book Advanced Swift: http://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift

struct Person {
    let name: String
    let city: String
}

let people = [

nicklockwood

Thoughts on Swift 2 Errors

When Swift was first announced, I was gratified to see that one of the (few) philosophies that it shared with Objective-C was that exceptions should not be used for control flow, only for highlighting fatal programming errors at development time.

So it came as a surprise to me when Swift 2 brought (What appeared to be) traditional exception handling to the language.

Similarly surprised were the functional Swift programmers, who had put their faith in the Haskell-style approach to error handling, where every function returns an enum (or monad, if you like) containing either a valid result or an error. This seemed like a natural fit for Swift, so why did Apple instead opt for a solution originally designed for clumsy imperative languages?

I'm going to cover three things in this post:

staltz

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

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This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

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conrjac

int main()
{
  std::string input = "abc,def,ghi";
	std::istringstream ss(input);
	std::string token;

	vector<string> playerInfoVector;
	while(std::getline(ss, token, ',')) {
		playerInfoVector.push_back(token);
		std::cout << token << '\n';