Software Engineering

This is the first post in a series dedicated to presenting solutions to common challenges that developers encounter when moving from an imperative programming approach to functional programming (FP). I will present a series of problems and provide solutions in both Java and Elixir, a functional language running on the Erlang VM.

By now you have probably heard all the hype about functional programming (FP) and may have even dipped your toe in the water by trying out one of the other Lisp dialects. Maybe you have experimented with some of the functional elements of Scala, Ruby, Python, or one of the newer languages.

Jafama is a Java library that provides fast numeric operations that are replacements for the methods on java.lang.Math. Jafama (Java Fast Math) consists of fast – but not sloppy – counterparts of java.lang.Math treatments, plus additional ones. They are usually about 2-4 (up to 15) times faster, with about 1e-15 accuracy, and handle special cases…

When working with spatial data one often needs to work with polygons to demarcate bounding areas. One important concept related to this is winding, which defines the relative order in which the vertex points of a polygon are listed. Winding can be either clockwise (CW) or counter-clockwise (anti-clockwise) (CCW), referring to the direction in which…