Functional Programming

Welcome to a new technical series on Channel 9 folded into a different kind of 9 format: C9 Lectures. These are what you think they are, lectures. They are not conversational in nature (like most of what you're used to on 9), but rather these pieces are entirely focused on education,…

Tomas Petricek, a PhD student at University of Cambridge focusing on programming models, teaches us about one of his favorite programming languages, F#. The main topic is programming data with F#. You'll learn about Type Providers and Tomas will show how you can easily call REST APIs from F# using…

In Chapter 2, Dr. Meijer introduces Haskell syntax and notation (via a Haskell implementation called Hugs, to be precise, which is based on Haskell 98) and we learn about the Haskell syntax that represents the fundamental construct of functional programming:functions. It's not like you're used…

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…

Brian Beckman and Erik Meijer are back with another episode of BMO! In this installment, Brian and Erik spend some time explaining the Lambda Calculus and most of the time digging into a real world application of general term rewriting. The Lambda Calculus is a specialized…

Functional programming is increasing in popularity these days given the inherent problems with shared mutable state that is rife in the imperative world. As we march on to a world of multi and many-core chipsets, software engineering must evolve to better equip software engineers with the tools to…

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 is here is the monad. Greg has a…

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…

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…

It's been WAY too long since we've had Brian Beckman sharing knowledge, insights and perspectives on Channel 9. This changes now! Needless to say, I was incredibly happy to spend an hour with Brian learning all about what he's up to these days. Not surprisingly, he's writing code and employing…