Functional Programming

Dr. Ralf Lämmel returns for an exploration of folds, aka bananas. This is lecture 5 in his C9 Lecture series  covering advanced functional programming topics. Welcome back, Ralf! We're so happy to have you here! Why bananas, Ralf? Banana is functional programming slang…

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…

Concurrency is a problem that faces all developers as we move to the age of ManyCore processor architectures. Managing state is an important aspect of programming generally and for parallel programming especially. The great Brian Beckman demonstrates three ways of labeling a binary tree with…

At GOTO Chicago Functional Programming Night, Erik Meijer and Rich Hickey sat down for a chat about the latest in Rich's programming language, Clojure, and also a had short discussion about one of Rich's latest projects, Datomic, a database written in Clojure. Always a pleasure to get a few titans…

Rich Hickey is the creator of the Clojure programming language. Most recently (over the past couple of years), Rich has been putting his iconoclastic ways to work on data programmability. The result is a new type of database, Datomic. Datomic is a database of flexible, time-based…

Greg Meredith, a mathematician and computer scientist, has graciously agreed to do a C9 lecture series covering monadic design principles applied to web development. You've met Greg before in a Whiteboard jam session with Brian Beckman. The fundamental concept here is the monad, and Greg has a novel…

Tony Morris is a developer who has deployed functional programming techniques in industry for over 10 years.  He's also a teacher and key player in Australia's increasingly vibrant functional programming community. Tony actively programs in Scala and Haskell so he possesses a well-rounded view…

Bertrand Meyer is a programming language guru, computer scientist and arguably the uncle of object oriented programming . Bertrand created the Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is an object-oriented language that is based on a fixed set of powerful principles like Design by Contract and…

Last week Don Syme joined me for an F# university tour here in Denmark. The final stop on the tour was at Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (mdcc.dk) for an open TechTalk on F# and functional programming on the .NET platform. To make this talk as broadly available as possible, we just…

I attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds. One of the most interesting talks was Gilad Bracha's session on his new programming language, Newspeak. Newspeak is really compelling from a language design perspective…