Make your own sentence from the title. I would do but apparently I can't see what's obvious... I love Subversion it gives me a quick way out of a horrific thinko. It's like a typo but involves a non-functional brain instead of non-functioning fingers. Revert is a fantastic action in a version control system. It's kinda like the Etch-a-Sketch end of the world where you decide it's all bad and you want to wipe the slate clean. Going back to how it was before I embarked on this idiotic mutually referencing tree bollocks for example...
What is now painfully obvious are a couple of things. I should never seek employment as the author of any form of garbage collection algorithm. A bit niche perhaps but it's good to know when you're backing a loser and get the hell out of Dodge. A more productive and practical observation is that if you want a tree to exist, all you need to do is ensure you hold a reference to the root node. This is the sort of idea that should get you a raised eyebrow and a courteous "get thee gone knave and procreate distantly" from any sane patent office on the grounds of being bloody obvious. Any country with such a patent office that doesn't allow idiocy like patenting either the bloody obvious or any form of software please apply by sending your address engraved in 18 point Arial on a gold brick of no less than 43.75 troy ounces. I can't guarantee anything beyond my admiration and proselytisation of your merits but 3lb of gold can't do any harm to my ambition to own an fun form of transport as I gather precious metals are having a bit of a renaissance as poly-chancellorous currencies fall into a cess pit. Best place really for political vanity in the face of economic reality.
Oh dear, bit of a tangent there. A true blue moon moment for my general mental track, honest. I was really just saying I'm a slow learner.
Happily that largely resolves the IDL difficulties of recent days. Self-inflicted wounds are always the most embarrassing to explain.
Joy! Rapture! I can now sleep! Oh, wait. No I can't cos that still leaves Haskell...
As an imperative programmer for 15+ years, the idea of code that not only doesn't maintain state but actively prevents you from doing so is difficult to the point of inducing significant cerebral meltage. OK, so I'm only on chapter 5 of "Too stupid to understand online tutorials? Read this, it takes it really slooooowly" but I can see the benefits of "pure" code versus "impure" code in Haskell.
"Pure" code in Haskell is code that has no state, is isolated from the outside world entirely and whose output depends entirely and solely on the inputs supplied. Thus "pure" code is mathematically provably correct. It is neither affected by the environment nor affects the environment itself. Therefore there can be no side-effects of executing it. Bugs in imperative code (C/C++/Java/C#/Fortran/Python/Ruby/Perl/many, many others...) can often be traced down, often at great expense in time, coffee and possibly headache medication, to unforeseen side-effects. Interestingly, to me at least, is the observation that the class methods I prefer are short, expressive ones which only depend on their input parameters... When I wrote them I thought they were intrinsically testable (depending solely on mockable inputs) and minimised problems. Prophetic? Hardly. Seems that good coding practices talk (regardless of language) and bullshit walks even if I pick them up almost by accident :/
"Impure" code in Haskell is code that deals with state, whether it is a loop counter (unnecessary with tail recursion or folds) or the existence of an uncertain and untrusted system (network, filesystem, DBMS, users...). You can do imperative stuff like I'm used to but it is rigidly separated from the pure code so side-effects can only happen where explicitly marked as possible.
At least this is my understanding so far. Does it show I'm trying to gauge my understanding of things by explaining them?
My slightly hazy impression that Haskell will support my most used imperative patterns like Observer, Strategy, Facade, Abstract Factory and Command? Jury's still out. Maybe the propaganda was true, functional programming does offer a completely different and better way to write code? It's certainly very expressive, I hope the serial loss of kip is worth it in the long run.
Maybe melting your brain is sometimes a good thing as it allows it to flow into new and better shapes?
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