Functional Programming

Well, my friends, the day has arrived. For thirteen weeks, you have been provided all the conceptual tools to take the leap into the deep end of the functional programming pool and float safely. The great Dr. Erik Meijer has generously given his value time to teach us the fundamentals as delivered…

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…

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to sit down and geek out with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (a Technical Fellow is the highest ranking technical position at Microsoft) and programming language design master. He's the creator of C# and one of the founders…

As you must know by now, Erk Meijer and team spend time thinking about and discovering the Essence in things. One year ago today, Bart De Smet blogged about the notion of a core set of LINQ operators, MinLINQ, the essence of LINQ. "Hey Bart, what is MinLINQ, exactly?"  "MinLINQ…

In Chapter 3, Dr. Meijer explores types and classes in Haskell. A type is a collection of related values and in Haskell every well-formed expression has a type. Using type inference, these types are automatically calculated at run time. Ifexpression e returns a type t, then e is of type t, e :: t. A…

In Chapter 8, Functional Parsers, it's all about parsing and parsers. A parser is a program that analyses a piece of text to determine its syntactic structure. In a functional language such as Haskell, parsers can naturallybe viewed as functions.  type Parser = String -> TreeA parser is…

In Chapter 4, Dr. Meijer teaches us about the art and practice of defining functions. Functions can be defined using conditional expressions and in Haskell conditional expressions must always have an else clause. Functions can also be defined using guarded equations and pattern matching. You will…

In Chapter 9, Interactive Programs, Dr. Meijer will teach us how to make programs in Haskell that are side-effecting:interactive. Haskell programs are pure mathematical functions with no side effects. That said, you want to be able to write Haskell programs that can read input from the keyboard and…

In Chapter 5, Dr. Meijer introduces and digs into List Comprehensions. In mathematics, comprehension notation is used to construct new sets from old sets. In Haskell, you can create new lists from old lists using a similarcomprehension syntax:[x^2 | x <- [1..5]]The above notation represents the…

It's been far too long since we've had some meaty functional programming content on C9. Luckily, none other than Graham Hutton dropped off a present on our doorstep! Dr. Hutton graciously provided Channel 9 with his latest self-filmed lecture—thank you, Graham! We're honored. This is certainly…