InfoQ Homepage Functional Programming Content on InfoQ
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Interview: Paul Hudak on Haskell
This interview with Paul Hudak, recorded at QCon San Franscisco 2008, begins with a discussion of when to introduce difficult Haskell concepts like monads; moves to a discussion of the philosophy of higher order programming, the success and influence of Haskell, its use in the mainstream, and concludes with the idea of teaching computer music and Haskell simultaneously.
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Declarative Concurrency For Ruby With Dataflow
Part of the Ruby language was influenced by functional programming techniques. Larry Diehl brings a declarative concurrent model to Ruby by importing the concept of unification from Oz Language with the Dataflow project.
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Presentation: Taming Effects with Functional Programming
In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2008, Simon Peyton-Jones advertises the need for programming purity achieved especially through use of functional languages and the increased attention given to functional programming.
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What Makes Haskell Worth Learning for Real World Applications
One of co-authors of the Real World Haskell book, John Goerzen, talks in a recent interview to O’Reilly about purity, laziness, recursiveness and many other subjects that make Haskell worth learning but may also be a source of reluctance for people coming from object oriented or imperative programming.
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Live Production Clojure Application Announced
A production health-care application built using Clojure (among other languages) has been announced, and is now running live. Several details have been provided regarding the architecture, deployment, and runtime behavior of the application.
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It's Official: Visual Studio 2010 Will Ship with F#
Back in 2007 it was revealed that F# would become a first class language on the .NET platform at some point in the future. Last night it was announced that F# will be included in the Visual Studio 2010 release.
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Is OOP Better for Structuring your Code?
Programming languages that offer more power and flexibility have been lately gaining momentum. Johnatan Tang highlights, however, the flexibility vs. productivity tradeoff in terms of program structure. Whereas multi-dispatch languages provide more flexibility in arranging code, traditional object orientation makes organizing programs easier.
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Interview: Joe Armstrong About Erlang
In this interview filmed during QCon London 2008, Joe Armstrong, designer of Erlang, speaks on various aspects of the Erlang language, presenting its roots, how it compares with other languages and why it has become popular these days due to its native ability to scale on multi core systems.
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Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele on Concurrency and Language Design
An interview recorded at JAOO, Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele talk about concurrency in language design. Anders Hejlsberg is the chief architect of C#, creator of Turbo Pascal, and former chief architect of Delphi. Guy Steele is the creator of Scheme and is currently working on Sun's Fortress, a programming language that focuses on parallelism and mathematics.
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Using Closures to Improve API Design and Usage
Some APIs such as those that perform complex parsing often expose intermediate results via events. As Eric White demonstrates, closures can be used to greatly simplify calling these APIs.
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F# Update: MonoDevelop, a New Book, and a New CTP
Though still officially just a research project, the excitement over F# continues unabated. In today's roundup, we take a brief look at what's new for F#.
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Iterators for VB
Visual Basic's Paul Vick recently revealed a proposal to add iterators in a yet named version. While meant to address the same use cases as C#'s yield return statement, the proposal looks more like something out of a function programmer's playbook.
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Lambda Expression Improvements for VB
For VB developers it is a toss-up for the most frustrating thing about anonymous functions. Paul Vick is currently discussing two of them, anonymous subroutines and multi-line anonymous functions.
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Presentation: Erlang - software for a concurrent world
We get more and more cores in our CPUs, but does our software run linearly faster? In most cases - no. We've hit a trend change when it comes to faster CPUs. We'll get more and more cores, but each core will be slower as the number of cores increase. In his talk, Joe Armstrong introduces Erlang and the ideas of Concurrent Oriented Programming which is one way to solve the problem.
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Should you really learn another language?
Blogger Gustavo Duarte cursed in church when he said that learning new programming languages is often a waste of time. He said that "In reality learning a new language is a gritty business in which most of the effort is spent on low-value tasks with poor return on time invested.". But not everyone agreed.