Video and slides synchronized, mp3 and slide download available at http://bit.ly/14UCkPI. Richard Minerich discusses design considerations when building a polyglot software architecture with the tools at hand.Filmed at qconnewyork.com. At Bayard Rock, Richard Minerich works tirelessly to apply cutting edge research to anti-money laundering and fraud. In the F# community he's been speaking, blogging and writing for over four years. He runs the NYC F# User Group and helps run the NY Haskell Users Group. His most recent work is "Professional F# 2.0" and he is an F# MVP.

1. Polyglot Architecture:
A Rational Approach to
Software Design
Richard Minerich
Senior Researcher at Bayard Rock
@Rickasaurus

2. InfoQ.com: News & Community Site
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Portuguese)
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Watch the video with slide
synchronization on InfoQ.com!
http://www.infoq.com/presentations
/polyglot-architecture-design

3. Presented at QCon New York
www.qconnewyork.com
Purpose of QCon
- to empower software development by facilitating the spread of
knowledge and innovation
Strategy
- practitioner-driven conference designed for YOU: influencers of
change and innovation in your teams
- speakers and topics driving the evolution and innovation
- connecting and catalyzing the influencers and innovators
Highlights
- attended by more than 12,000 delegates since 2007
- held in 9 cities worldwide

4. Research and Development Perspective
▪ A focus on long term solutions to
complex problems
▪ A lot of room for experimentation,
but decisions must be justified
▪ Very small teams, and so few
resources for maintenance, and
little time for production issues
▪ Talented people who are generally
excited about learning new things

5. Why do we use the languages we use?
▪ I always use the same one or two languages.
▪ Pseudo-Technical management picks all of our technologies.
▪ I need to Maximize Synergy by Hadooping the Big Data Analytics.
▪ I am fanatically obsessed with a particular language.
▪ Weighted random sampling fed by the benchmark game.
▪ We came up with a set of criteria and judged several candidates
empirically in context.

6. Considerations (oh god)
Safety, FindingTalent, CPU Performance,Training, Platform
Limitations, Compiler Support, Community, External Libraries,Tooling,
Debugging, Primary Community Focus, Unique Features, Simplicity,
Development Environments, Familiarity, Cross Platform Support,
Asynchrony, Hype, Industry Standards, Algorithms,Tutorials, Data
Structures, Stability, Memory Usage, Garbage Collection, Syntactic
Flexibility, CompilationTargets, Language/Platform Interop,Taste,
Core Libs, Code Clarity, Licensing, Error Messages, BuildTools,
Testability, Requirements,Type Systems, Embeddability, Scalability,
FaultTolerance, Parallelization, Binary Package Size, Permissions,
Algebraic DataTypes, Obfuscation, Peer Pressure,Technical Debt,
Does it have what plants crave?

7. Considerations (fixed)
Safety – “In the limit”, cost of unexpected changes, testing
burden, sanity of core libs, dependency handling
Community – Support options, library quantity and quality,
training, hiring, enthusiasm, culture of craftsmanship
Performance – Relative dimensions include cpu, memory and network
Tooling – Debugging, static analysis, linting, test frameworks
And they’re all tradeoffs based on Context.
i.e. Requirements, Platform(s),Team Skills, Available Funds

8. Case Study: 0install (by Thomas Leonard)
Choosing a Replacement for Python
Language OCaml PythonHaskell Rust ATS C# Go
Speed 4 2 4 3 5 1 3
Dependencies 4 5 3 2 5 1 3
Bin. compatibility 4 5 2 2 4 5 3
Bad stdout 1 1 1 5 1 1 1
Missing env 5 5 5 5 5 3 1
Memory safety 5 5 5 4 3 5 5
Diagnostics 1 5 3 3 2 1 1
Ease of coding 4 5 4 3 1 4 3
Shared libraries 1 5 2 2 5 5 1
Static types 4 1 4 5 5 3 2
Privilege bounds 5 1 5 1 2 5 1
Mutability 4 3 2 5 4 4 4
C interoperability 3 3 4 4 5 4 4
Asynchronous 5 4 5 5 1 5 5
Total 50 50 49 49 48 47 37
http://is.gd/0install_language_shootout

9. What is Safety? (My favorite topic)
Imagine your goal is perfect bug-free software (in the limit)
▪ Is the compiler your friend?
▪ Is it easy to write correct code?
▪ Will it “fail fast” when
in an unexpected state?
▪ When things fail will it
get up and keep going?
▪ Can you trust external libraries?

10. Context is everything
▪ Projected lifetime, time to market, burn rate
▪ Explicit requirements, technology interop, customer systems
▪ Current talent, willingness to learn, and training expenditure
▪ Previous purchases and existing platform limitations
▪ Domain problems that are helped greatly certain unique features

11. It Usually Comes Down To Unique Features
▪ JavaScript – Do we really have any other choice?
▪ C# – Great GUI builders, code generation tooling
▪ F# –Type providers, data modeling and transformation
▪ Matlab – Fast linear algebra, tons of high quality algorithms
▪ C++ (/CLI) – Library selection, managed-unmanaged interop
Currently Under Consideration
▪ R – table structured data analysis and visualization, type provider
▪ Haskell – Unique libraries, fantastically safe
▪ Scala – Beautiful and concise leverage of Spark/Hadoop, quite safe

12. Isn’t writing your own language
generally a bad idea?
What I found for scripting options on .NET:
IronPython, IronRuby, IronJS, DynamicLinq…
DynamicLinq was almost exactly what I wanted. Almost…
…If it weren’t for the darned manual conversions…
… So after much consideration, I wrote Barb.

13. Barb?! (github.com/Rickasaurus/Barb)
It’s a simple .net scripting language
Name.Contains "John“ and (Age > 20 orWeight > 200)

14. Barb in Action: Safe Alert Manager

15. Slots to fill (Safe Alert Manager)
▪ User Interface
▪ User Behavior Model
▪ Data Access
▪ DataTransform
▪ Algorithms / Data Structures
▪ Ad-Hoc Behaviors
▪ Glue
UI (C#) &
Analysis (C#)
Glue (F# and Barb)
Data &
Config
In
Data
Out
Algorithms (F#)

16. Key Insight: Reverential Transparency
Matlab C++ Haskell R Python

17. F# Type Providers
Typed Access to Data and Languages

18. MAP: Secure Distributed ML
UI (JS),Analysis (JS & SQL)
& Computation (F#)
Glue (F#)
Data
Computation in
F# or viaType
Provider in:
Matlab, R,
Python
Goal:
Experts and users coexist
in the same system with
different tools.
Typed Dataset
Representation

19. MAP Language Choices
▪ User Interface / Model – Javascript/Type Script
▪ Analysis Data Access – BRSQL in the UI
▪ Analysis DataTransform – Javascript in the UI
▪ Glue – Almost entirely F#
▪ Algorithms / Data Structures – F#,Type Provider, C++/CLI

20. On the Horizon: Asm.js (with emscripten)
is.gd/cool_asmjs_demos

21. On the Horizon: Rust
www.rust-lang.org

22. On the Horizon: Julia
julialang.org

23. Thanks for Coming!
@Rickasaurus
RichardMinerich.com
Come visit the NYC
Haskell and F# User
Groups!