Why Functional Programming Matter

What issues do we concern when implementing and maintaining systems?

One of the most concern is debugging during maintenance: "this code crashed because it observed some unexpected value."

Then, it turns out that the ideas of no side effects and immutability, which functional programming promotes, can help.

Shared mutable data is the root cause

Shared mutable data are read and updated by more than one of the methods. Share mutable data structures make it harder to track changes in different parts of your program.

An immutable object is an object that can't change its state after it's instantiated so it can't be affected by the actions of a function. It would be a dream to maintain because we wouldn't have any bad surprises about some object somewhere that unexpectedly modifies a data structure.

A new thinking: Declarative programming

There are two ways thinking about implementing a system by writing a program.

- Imperative programming: has instructions that mimic the low-level vocabulary of a computer (for example, assignment, conditional branching, and loops).

- Declarative programming: you give rules saying what you want, and you expect the system to decide how to achieve it.

Functional programming = side-effect-free + declarative programming

Functional programming exemplifies the idea of declarative programming ("just say what you want, using expressions that don't interact, and for which the system can choose the implementation") and side-effect-free which is mentioned above when using immutable objects approach.

Reference

Image result for java 8 in action

Alan Mycroft and Mario Fusco, Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and Functional-style Programming. Part 4. Beyond Java 8.

Comments

AngularJS - Build a custom validation directive for using multiple emails in textarea

AngularJS already supports the built-in validation with text input with type email. Something simple likes the following:
<input name="input" ng-model="email.text" required="" type="email" /> <span class="error" ng-show="myForm.input.$error.email"> Not valid email!</span>
However, I used a text area and I wanted to enter some email addresses that's saparated by a comma (,). I had a short research and it looked like AngualarJS has not supported this functionality so far. Therefore, I needed to build a custom directive that I could add my own validation functions. My validation was done only on client side, so I used the $validators object.

Note that, there is the $asyncValidators object which handles asynchronous validation, such as making an $http request to the backend.

This is just my implementation on my project. In order to understand that, I supposed you already had experiences with Angular…

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"
- Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University.

Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days.

There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot.
Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java.

Used Technologies and ToolsOracle JDK 1.8.0_151Apache Maven 3.5…

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons.

We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown.

.ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: absolut…

Math fundamentals and Katex

It was really tough for me to understand many articles about data science due to the requirements of understanding mathematics (especially linear algebra). I’ve started to gain some basic knowledges about Math by reading a book first.The great tool Typora and stackedit with supporting Katex syntax simply helps me to display Math-related symbols.Let’s start!The fundamental ideas of mathematics: “doing math” with numbers and functions. Linear algebra: “doing math” with vectors and linear transformations.1. Solving equationsSolving equations means finding the value of the unknown in the equation. To find the solution, we must break the problem down into simpler steps. E.g:x2−4=45x2−4+4=45+4x2=49x=49∣x∣=7x=7 or x=−7\begin{aligned} x^2 - 4 &= 45\\ x^2 - 4 + 4 &= 45 + 4\\ x^2 &= 49\\ \sqrt{x}&=\sqrt{49}\\ |x| &= 7\\ x=7 &\text{ or } x=-7 \end{aligned}x2−4x2−4+4x2x∣x∣x=7=45=45+4=49=49=7 or x=−72. NumbersDefinitions
Mathematicians like to classify the d

Applying pipeline “tensorflow_embedding” of Rasa NLU

According to this nice article, there was a new pipeline released using a different approach from the standard one (spacy_sklearn). I wanted to give it a try to see whether it can help with improving bot’s accuracy.

After applying done, I gave an evaluation of “tensorflow_embedding”. It seemed to work better a bit. For example, I defined intents “greet” and “goodbye” with some following messages in my training data.
## intent:greet- Hey! How are you? - Hi! How can I help you? - Good to see you! - Nice to see you! - Hi - Hello - Hi there ## intent:goodbye- Bye - Bye Bye - See you later - Take care - Peace In order to play around with Rasa NLU, I created a project here. You can have a look at this change from this pull request. Yay!

When I entered message “hi bot”, then bot with “tensorflow_embedding” could detect intent “greet” with better confidence scores rather than bot with “spacy_sklearn”. The following are responses after executing curl -X POST localhost:5000/parse -d '{&qu…

vhandit | Python & Machine Learning

Search This Blog