A business rule is the basic unit of rule processing in a Business Rule Management System (BRMS) and, as such, requires a fundamental understanding. Rules consist of a set of actions and a set of conditions whereby actions are the consequences of each condition statement being satisfied or true. With rare exception, conditions test the property values of objects taken from an object model which itself is gleaned from a Data Dictionary and UML diagrams. See my article on Data Dictionaries for a better understanding on this subject matter.

A simple rule takes the form:

if condition(s)

then actions.

An alternative form includes an else statement where alternate actions are executed in the event that the conditions in the if statement are not satisfied:

if condition(s)

then actions

else alternate_actions

It is not considered a best prectice to write rules via nested if-then-else statements as they tend to be difficult to understand, hard to maintain and even harder to extend as the depth of these statements increases; in other words, adding if statements within a then clause makes it especially hard to determine which if statement was executed when looking at a bucket of rules. Moreoever, how can we determine whether the if or the else statement was satisfied without having to read the rule itself. Rules such as these are often organized into simple rule statements and provided with a name so that when reviewing rule execution logs one can determine which rule fired and not worry about whether the if or else statement was satisfied. Another limitation of this type of rule processing is that it does not take full advantage of rule inferencing and may have a negative performance impact on the Rete engine execution. Take a class with HSG and find out why.

Rule Conditions

A career in the field of software development remains immensely popular due to various factors. Chief among them of course is the higher compensation and lucrative pay scale in the IT industry when compared to other career options. In addition, the flexibility of work hours and the sheer sense of achievement experienced by one while creating new programs are unsurpassed by any other job.

Popularity and reach of Software Programs

Software programming has become a quintessential part of our day to day life, right from the smartphones in your pocket, to video gaming, and everything in between. The opportunities in this field are truly astounding. The niches for specializing are also diverse, from creating operating systems, to mobile app development, or web app development to name a few.

There are various ways in which you can distinguish yourself in the market for the much coveted title of software programmer. Here, we focus on some of them.

F# is excellent for specialties such as scientific computing and data analysis. It is an excellent choice for enterprise development as well. There are a few great reasons why you should consider using F# for your next project.

Concise

F# is not cluttered up with coding noise;  no pesky semicolons, curly brackets, and so on. You almost never have to specify the kind of object you're referencing because of its powerful type inference system. It usually takes fewer lines of code to solve the same issue.

Convenient

Common programming tasks are much easier in F#. These include generating and using state machines, comparison and equality, list processing, as well as complex type definitions. It is very easy to generate powerful and reusable code because functions are first class objects. This is done by creating functions that have other functions as parameters or that combine existing functions to generate a new functionality.

Correctness

F# has a strong type system, and, therefore, prevents many common errors such as null reference exceptions. Valuables are immutable by default which, too, prevents a huge class of errors. You can also encode business logic by utilizing the type system. When done correctly, it is impossible to mix up units of measure or to write incorrect code thereby decresing the need of unit tests.

Concurrency

F# has number of built-in libraries. These libraries help when more than one thing at a time is occurring. Parallelism and asynchronous programming are very simple. There is also a built-in actor model as well as excellent support for event handling and functional reactive programming. Sharing state and avoiding locks are much easier because data structures are immutable by default.

Completeness

F# also supports other styles that are not 100 percent pure. This makes it easier to interact with the non-pure world of databases, websites, other applications, and so on. It is actually designed as a hybrid functional/OO language. F# is also part of the .NET ecosystem. This gives you seamless access to all the third party .NET tools and libraries. It operates on most platforms. These platforms include Linux and smartphones via mono. Visual Studio is integrates with F# as well. This means you get many plug-ins for unit tests, a debugger, a IDE with IntelliSense support, other development tasks. You can use MonoDevelop IDE on Linux.

Related:

F# - Marching Towards Top 10 Programming Languages

What Are the Advantages of Python Over Ruby?

Top 10 Programming Languages Expected To Be In Demand in 2014