realm.io recently posted a video that really resonated with me. The video was of a presentation by Daniel Steinberg at the 2016 try! Swift conference. His presentation was titled “Blending Cultures: The Best of Functional, Protocol-Oriented, and Object-Oriented Programming.”
What I Liked
I’ve been having some self doubt lately, specifically around what feels like an overwhelming mountain to climb to re-program my mind to think in a functional way.
I’ve certainly made progress, and as I’ve written before, one of the main reasons I started this blog was to capture my learnings along the way in that area. A year ago, reading Functional Swift by Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra I kind of had my world turned upside down. It was really what first opened my eyes to this new way of programming. Fast forward to today, as these new functional techniques gain more and more appeal in my mind, I start to wrestle with the question, “Well what about all that object oriented stuff I learned and have so much experience with?” I spent many many years in Object Oriented languages (Java and Objective-C). It’s where a lot of my go to tools in my toolbox are still based. So, are those all just obsolete in this new way of programming? While no one is saying so specifically, I do hear a lot of things like “Try to write code in the Swift way.” Or I see sample Swift code that is heavily functional. And I’m still unsure what a monad is, and forget about a monoid. It quickly becomes over my head.
It was very refreshing to hear someone I respect, Daniel Steinberg, present a compelling argument that these programming paradigms not only can live together, but also lead to a more compelling system design. Each tool should be appropriately used.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And maybe that’s where, before really making the functional (or even protocol-oriented) shift, you see a problem and immediately think: composition! Or, inheritance! Watching this video, now I feel reassured that there’s room and even good purpose for some of those older trusty tools (object oriented programming).
I Owe A Lot To Daniel
Back in 2008, when I was just diving into iOS programming, I attended a course by the Pragmatic Studio taught by Daniel Steinberg and Bill Dudney. It provided a critical foundation of learning, and really introduced me to the community of iOS development. I loosely maintained a relationship with Daniel too. About a year later, I hired him through Pragmatic Studio to come teach a similar course on iOS engineering at my employer for others to learn as part of our efforts to kickstart mobile development. Then fast-forward about five years, and we crossed paths again at CocoaConf 2014 in Boston where he put on a spectacular day long introduction to Swift, and then gave an incredibly passioned keynote during the conference. Thank you Daniel for everything, if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now. I continue to learn from you.
Happy cleaning.