Dynamic typing - Timeout

Another piece of useful functionality made easy by dynamic typing and clojure.async. Adding a timeout to a function.

Dynamic typing - Sampler filter

This post is superficially related to the basic concept of the previous, but shows a very similar pattern to Circuit Breaker. I call it Sampler filter, but I'm pretty sure there is an established name in the field of electrical engineering.
By implementing a Swing UI of my Mars Rover project (source code is here) I recently faced the problem that if I run hundreds of rovers, then refreshing the panel after every rover position change is impossible. Each position change puts an event - containing the positions for all rovers - on the channel the displayer logic listens to, and the messages just kept piling up. It's a typical IO bottleneck. So I decided it's enough to display every 100th or 1000th of them. They would change faster than my eyes can process them anyway. So I took the original function performing the display - repaint! - and wrapped it in a sampler. Here is the code

Dynamic typing - Circuit breaker

Despite my fascination for Clojure I'm yet to be sold on dynamic typing. Frankly the most frustrating thing about Clojure for me is the constant struggle with the lack of static type check. What went wrong and where? There are no types to guide me nor auto-completion, and I feel I have to hold too much in my head instead of letting the IDE help me out so I can concentrate on the problem. I read quite often arguments like "dynamic typing gives you a much greater flexibility" and "the static type system is often in your way", but honestly I don't understand them. Probably because I never have done anything serious in a dynamically typed language. So I've embarked on a journey of deliberately looking for situations when dynamic typing clearly gives an advantage. Here I'd like to show the first (and so far the only) one I found. Before looking at the more complex task of writing a circuit breaker, I'd like to start with a simple one.

Logger wrapper

Imagine you'd like to log the call of some functions. In Scala or Clojure it's an easy thing to do with higher-order functions.

Now this logger is able to transform any function with the (Int, Int) => Int signature to a logging one. Which is cool, but not cool enough. For every signature it has to be reimplemented. In a dynamically typed language you can use the same logger function for all. But this logger is a quite boring example, so I'd like to show something that is really useful and practical, the...

...Circuit Breaker

Imagine you application has to call a lot of web services, but the systems on the other end are quite unreliable. Sometimes they respond, but they have the habit of being unavailable for short time windows. You wouldn't like to waste time and thread calling them the n-th time if they haven't been responsive for a while. Better to wait a bit, then try again later. This is where the Circuit Breaker can help.

The Clojure version is


An easy way to try it out is to find a function that is simple to call with arguments that will break it, and wrap it in the circuit-breaker. The arithmetic divison is the perfect candidate.

Circuit Breaker is a fascinating pattern for many reasons. First it shows a clean analog to physical engineering solutions, making software engineering look like real engineering, and also making it easy to understand. Second, from an ezoteric FP point of view, Circuit Breaker is like magical entity that swallows a "stupid" function and spits out its doppelganger, same in signature and behaviour, but with an extra "intelligence".

The reason why dynamic typing fits so well to circuit breaker, I think, is that the extra functionality it adds has nothing to do with what the function does, nor with its signature.