Working Hard on Closed Deal Adjustment
The large part of today has been spent trying to add in the closed deal adjustment to the demand to make Dark Magic on feature-parity with the code in Quantum Lead. The idea is that we needed to look at all the deals that have closed after the raw demand was generated, and then look at how much of them sold, or at least what their sales expectations are. This is then subtracted from the demand units requested as it represents fulfilled demand in the time span of the demand's life.
The code was all written in ruby, and worked fine, but was heavily dependent on the fact that (j)ruby uses references and mutable objects as it had multiple passes of the adjustment based on the individual deal options that had closed. In order to refactor this into something that works in the immutable space of essential clojure (which is how I'm calling the design philosophy of my co-worker that's a clojure purist) I spent lots and lots of time trying to figure out how to put this into that primitive functional style.
I had learned that there were many things in clojure that could make this very simple. There's transactional memory for mutability, and references, so that - in theory, it could have been a very simple port of the code. But Socrates, as I'll call my co-worker with the purist attitudes, wouldn't have any of this. Since this is being done (against my better judgement) to make him happy, that's what we're doing.
I wonder if he has any idea why this is all really happening? Maybe he just thinks we all "see the light"? Who knows. I'm half hoping that this fails and we do it again in ruby, and half succeeds so I can have guaranteed job security as Socrates will be bored with all this long before we're done with the system we're building.
In the end, I was stuck on the one problem, and I had to sit and wait for about 20 mins as Socrates came back from his walkabout - wherever that took him, and have him show me how to refactor this ruby code into something that works in clojure.
Functional languages are nice. But I'm hating this experience because I feel I'm in the middle of an ocean, and my only life raft is a guy that doesn't care about jack-diddly, and comes and goes as he pleases. It's a very uncomfortable position to be in. Maybe in six months when I know clojure well enough not to have these blocks, it'll be OK… but now, it's just exceptionally frustrating to think that this company is making a business decision to use this new language, and then forcing me to be on this project because they want it to succeed.
Very frustrating.