preface

After I came into contact with RxJava, I was deeply attracted by its unique elegance, so I spontaneously learned about some of the history behind it (the nature of research mania). After learning about it, I really want to share with you the giant standing behind RxJava – Erik Meijer.

Note: As most of the links in this article are from Youtube. And has not yet found domestic reprint. So almost any video may require FQ viewing. Please understand. Knowledge comes to those who crave for it. I’m sure that shouldn’t be a problem for you.

background

Born in Curacao, Erik Meijer is an academic computer scientist, entrepreneur, and tie-dye enthusiast.

Earlier at Microsoft as a software architect, yes. Net, F# and other important contributions. LINQ, Volta,Rx.Net, and so on. Today, Rx extends to many languages, most notably RxJava and RxJs.

At the same time, As a firm academic, Erik Meijer participated in the design of Haskell. I also participated in the production of a series of courses such as C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer-Functional Programming Fundamentals

After leaving Microsoft, worked with Facebook to design hacks (a dialect of PHP). Worked with Google to design Dart.

Erik Meijer is currently working at Facebook, and his main job is the artificial intelligence that we talked about a lot. The main topic is how to train models to generate code automatically.

Erik Meijer and Rx

Erik has actually done a lot of Rx explaining videos himself. One of the best is Expert to Expert: Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer – Inside the.NET Reactive Framework (Rx). My first introduction to Rx in this video is from IEnumerable(Iterable in Java). For the first time, this video also shows how Erik is applying Monad concepts to Rx to make it more powerful. A simple dual operation from IEmuerable to IObservable. Greatly simplifies the complexity of asynchrony. Erik himself calls Rx a representation of asynchrony. For a more detailed explanation of this concept, refer to my previous article: A different Introduction to RxJava

Erik Meijer with Machine Learning

When I first heard about Erik Meijer, it was a bit of a surprise and a bit of a surprise. Surprisingly, I personally thought he would go on to study software architecture or functional programming. And of course, as a math enthusiast himself, it is quite natural for him to do math-based machine learning.

My first contact was in a Kotlin Conference by Erik Meijer: KotlinConf 2017-My Life as a Tech Transfer Monad by Erik Meijer. Although he’s working on machine learning, he doesn’t believe in the term “artificial intelligence.” He argues that this is just a Generalization of data, and he uses an ancient form of 18th-century mathematics: bayesian probability. In the video, he talks about our current world of Software engineering (Software 1.0). Programmers drink coffee (snack) and write code. In the new world (Software 2.0). We feed data to the machine, and we use machine learning to generate models.

Boolean
true
false

After seeing that if it is really successful in the short term, I may be this kind of programmer interview “unemployed” it. Of course, as we embrace the future and change, we should not be afraid. It’s more about looking forward to the day.

conclusion

A short blog post is certainly not an overview of Erik’s contributions to the industry. Moreover, as an ordinary programmer, my understanding of the gods at this level is limited to conferences and some videos, literature and other materials. Just the tip of the iceberg. But his contributions were life-changing for me. From a procedural programmer to a functional world. Also from RxJava and so on to understand mathematics and category theory in some of the theory. Later in the lecture, we will learn about probabilistic programming, which is a very advanced concept at the moment. He says in the video:

If we get caught up in the question of which Framework is better, Vue or React, Flutter or Kotlin, we are going to dig our own grave.

This sentence is also the main reason why I want to share this post with you. Life is not easy, but if you want to make some achievements in technology, you should not focus on the details that make little difference and gain little.

The last

Although this time is also due to a female fan strongly urged to write more. But in the spirit of writing the principle of no water. It’s also a subject that’s been struggling for a long time. I hope you’ve come away from this post feeling like you’ve wasted five precious minutes of your life.