Friday, July 1, 2016

The Value of pass-by-name Semantics

One of the nice features of the Scala language is the ability to use pass-by-name semantics. This isn't something that was invented for Scala. I remember first encountering it while studying for the CS subject GRE back in the mid-1990s. However, it is a feature that isn't very common in modern languages. For those who aren't familiar with this passing style, an argument that is passed-by-name is not evaluated when the function/method is called. Instead, a "thunk" is passed into the function/method. This "thunk" is basically a closure over the code with no arguments. It is evaluated each time that the value is used in the function/method. If it helps, you could think of it as being a lazy argument that doesn't cache its value, so it is re-evaluated each time. This might not sound like much, but it enables a lot of the powerful features of the Scala language, especially in regards to creating DSLs.

Today I was asked about an ideal way of doing something in Java. The problem involves reading through a file and adding values to a Map. After some testing, it was discovered that these files include duplicate keys. Since the Java libraries don't include a multimap, the solution is to use a Map<String, List<Integer>>. The person working on this code was trying to find a succinct way of writing the code that will add values to this Map. Of course, the first time a key is found, you have to create a new List and add the one value. Subsequent matches on that key need to add the value to the List that is already there. Here is the straightforward approach to doing this.

  if(map.containsKey(key) {
    map.get(key).add(value);
  } else {
    map.put(key, value);
  }

It's not really all that long or complex, but the question was, can it be improved upon, especially since Java 8 added some new, more expressive, functional features. If I were doing this in Scala, I would use get on the Map to get back an Option and work with that, or I could use getOrElse on the Map directly. It happens that Java 8 added Optional as well as a getOrDefault method on their Map type. As a result, we can write the following code in Java 8.

  map.put(key, map.getOrDefault(key, new ArrayList<String>()).add(value));

This is perfectly fine code in many ways. It compiles. It runs. It does what you are expecting. People familiar with this library will even find it to be easy to read. However, there is a detail in here that isn't immediately obvious that makes this code rather wasteful with memory. (That really just means that your garbage collector is going to be invoked most often than it really needs to be.) The problem is that all arguments in Java are evaluated then passed either by value or by reference depending on whether they are primitives or object types. The key is that the new ArrayList<String>() is going to be evaluated every time this line is executed, even if the value is in the Map. On the other hand, in Scala, the getOrElse method passes the second argument by name. As a result, it will never be evaluated unless needed. So when you do something like this, you are not doing extra work to calculate a default unless you actually need it. Granted, the library writers for Java 8 could have opted to make the second argument of getOrDefault a function or something like it that could be passed as a lambda expression. However, they didn't. Probably because doing so would have made the calling syntax uglier. Pass-by-name does not have that drawback.

Of course, pass-by-name has a lot of other handy uses in Scala. It is probably the most important feature when it comes to Scala's ability to implement Domain Specific Languages and create libraries that function like language extensions. This was the first time though that I could recall really feeling the lack of this feature in some other language. Other new languages, that I have looked at some, Rust and Kotlin come to mind, seem to have also skipped over this feature. Perhaps it is time other languages began to bring it back into standard usage.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Are College Students Customers?

I'm writing this blog post in response to Students are not customers; Are they?. I actually have a fairly simple view of this issue. The student sitting in front of me today is not my customer. The person that student will be in 5-50 years is my customer. From the student perspective, education is an investment in your future self. From the college perspective, alumni are the real test of whether or not the college is doing what it should. Alumni who are successful in life benefit the University in many ways, going well beyond their financial support.

Taking this viewpoint, my goal is not to make my current students happy. My goal is to equip them for later success in life. I want to make certain that when they graduate, they are have the skills to enter the workforce and do what they are hoping to do. That isn't going to happen if I coddle them and give everyone good grades. It means that I need to challenge them, but support them. I get to spent time with my students and come to know them. I can gauge how much assistance different students need to master the material. I need to impart to them the knowledge and skills that I think will put them ahead of others in the workforce when the first enter. I also need to try to develop their ability to teach themselves so that they will continue to learn through their careers so that they can keep themselves relevant.

I appreciate the small, liberal arts setting that I teach in, because I think that it really allows me to do what is best for my students. It also forces my students to pick up the other skills that they will need to know for their future, that I'm probably not the ideal person to teach. I stress to prospective students and occasionally to current students how important communication skills and critical thinking are going to be in their careers. I focus mostly on teaching them how to break down problems and communicate the solution method to a computer to make the computer solve the problems. The successful alumnus isn't going to just sit in front of a computer and code all day for 40 years after graduation. They should advance to being team leads, managers, even vice presidents and CTOs. Those jobs also require knowing how to communicate with humans in both written and spoken form. Many of my current students don't like that they have to take a bunch of courses outside of CS, but the people that I think of as our customers, the future selves of these students, inevitably come to appreciate the breadth of their education as much as they appreciate the rigors of the technical aspects of my personal instruction.

As a final benefit of this approach to "students as customers", I get to tell students who do complain about courses being hard (with a hint of sarcasm) that I am just looking out for their future selves. If I have to tear down the current version to build a better one, then so be it. ;)