Erik Meijer

Our favorite iconoclast, Erik Meijer, presented a very interesting talk at a recent GOTO Chicago event, Functional Programming Night. He originally planned on doing his popular "Fundamentalist Functional Programming" talk, but instead decided to address FP from a slightly different angle -…

Happy new year! It's hard to believe that it's 2010. To start off the new year right, how about some Beckman and Meijer? You recently learned about Dr. Beckman's perspective on covariance and contravariance in physics. Dr. Meijer found this topic to be incredibly interesting and the two geniuses…

JavaScript is the most widely used programming language on the web. As the great Douglas Crockford likes to say, JavaScript is both the world's most popular programming language and the world's least popular programming language at the same time.In this episode of Expert to Expert (to Expert),…

You've already learned a great deal about Erik Meijer's latest programming creation, Rx, right here on Channel 9 (here and here, to be precise). Well, wouldn't it be great to get the two key minds behind Rx in one place with one whiteboard? Yes, of course it would! Enter…

Erik Meijer interviews .NET team PM Immo Landwerth and Software Developer Andrew Arnott. The topic is Immutable Collections, a new set of immutable types for .NET. You can play around with these today as part of a preview release (NuGet link below). Tune in! Niners asked questions in advance…

Lars Bak is a virtual machine master. He and team have created a Javascript VM, V8, that takes Javascript syntax and produces optimized machine code directly. The result is very performant execution of Javascript. How does V8 work, exactly? What are the basic design decisions that have gone into…

In Chapter 7, Dr. Meijer teaches us about Higher-Order Functions. A function is called higher-order if it takes a function as an argument and returns a function as a result:twice    :: (a -> a) -> a -> atwice f x = f (f x)The function twice above is higher…

I caught up with the venerable Erik Meijer recently to discuss functional programming languages, academic versus real-world application of functional programming languages (there are very good reasons why people don't program Windows applications in, say, Haskell...) and, well, Erik. Why does Erik…

In Chapter 10, Declaring Types and Classes, Dr. Meijer teaches us about type declarations, data declarations, arithmetic expressions, etc.  In Haskell, a new name for an existing type can be defined using atype declaration:type String = [Char]String is a synonym for the type [Char].Like…

In Chapter 6, Dr. Meijer guides us through the world of recursive functions. In Haskell, functions can be defined in terms of themselves.  Such functions are called recursive. For example: factorial 0 = 1factorial (n+1) = (n+1) * factorial nfactorial maps 0 to 1, and…