The personal website of Daniel Brice, PhD.

Made with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

I’ll be using this space to muse about Math and coding and games, mostly.

Latest Blog Posts

• Jul 7, 2018

  Getting More Meaning From Your Case Classes

  This will be a small post where I share some techniques we found for getting some additional type safety from our Scala case classes. We’ll look at case classes that validate their input data and we look at case classes that allow selecting from among multiple instances of the same typeclass.

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• May 16, 2018

  Denotational Semantics in a Nutshell

  Wherein I attempt to give a 10,000-foot overview of semantics of programming languages.

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• Apr 18, 2018

  Exception Handling and I/O with MTL

  This post is Part 3 of a series on type-safe failure handling. Part 1 is in Scala and examines Scala’s Either class as a mechanism for early-return control flow. Part 2 ports the program to Haskell, where I/O is explicitly encapsulated by the IO type. This post will demonstrate the use of monad transformers to refactor the example from Part 2.

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• Jan 5, 2018

  Exception Handling with Explicit IO

  In a previous post, we added exception handling to a hypothetical API server written in Scala. Since Scala implicitly allows arbitrary I/O anywhere, modeling exception handling by adding a layer of indirection using Either values was essentially free. I wanted to try implementing the same logic in Haskell, which would force us to deal with intermingling exception handling intermingled with explicit I/O, creating two layers of abstraction that we’ll have to juggle.

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• Dec 31, 2017

  Three Models of Exception Handling

  A hotshot teammate just pulled a miracle. Over the weekend, they built the API our customers have been promised for the past year, averting an existential crisis for the company. One problem: Only the happy path returns a response; all exceptional circumstances simply crash the computer. So, it’s up to us to productionalize the prototype by adding appropriate error handling, and we won’t sacrifice compile-time safety and re-usability along the way.

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