I am happy to announce that videos of all talks at ICFP and some of the associated workshops this year have made available online: http://www.vimeo.com/user2191865/albums I’m sure you’ll join me in thanking Malcolm Wallace for the time and effort he put into making this possible. Thank you Malcolm! –Wouter There are videos for the Erlang [...]
The 12th ICFP Programming Contest is starting up again next week. (via reddit)
I wanted to know what currying means in practice for programmers who are not themselves theoretical computer scientists so I asked about it here. There were a lot of informative replies; and the most direct answers to the question seem to be: Anthony Cowley: There are many cases where Curried functions can be convenient, but [...]
Functional Java is an open source library that aims to prepare the Java programming language for the inclusion of closures. It also serves as a platform for learning functional programming concepts by introducing these concepts using a familiar language. The library is intended for use in production applications and is thoroughly tested using the technique [...]
Functional objects is a presentation by Matthias Felleisen from ECOOP 2004. It was mentioned more than a few times during the past month on the PLT discussion list. Though it is 74 pages, it doesn’t feel very long; and there is a lot of good content in there. “Java people” will even be happy to [...]
Jane Street is sponsoring a summer project for students in 2009 with the goal of “encourag[ing] growth in the functional programming community”. I haven’t got any strong feelings about the best means by which to encourage that adoption; so I will be interested to see what comes of it. (via PLT)
Helium is a user-friendly compiler designed especially for learning the functional programming language Haskell. The quality of the error messages has been the main concern both in the choice of the language features and in the implementation of the compiler. Helium implements almost full Haskell, where the most notable difference is the absence of type [...]
In 1987 Phil Wadler wrote the paper Why Calculating is Better than Scheming. It is an essay on the shortcomings of using Scheme as the programming language with which to teach beginning programmers in SICP, and how Miranda would have a better choice for teaching the software engineers of tomorrow. This was very fun for [...]
Most of the folks with whom I’ve talked about Functional Programming seem to be very skilled in both dynamically and statically typed languages. I’ve learned only Scheme well. Wondering what should come next, I posted to comp.lang.scheme asking about what is a good statically typed Functional Programming language to learn after Scheme. Anton’s reply piqued [...]
Commercial Use articles focus on functional programming “as a means, not an end”. As such, we solicit papers about experiences using functional languages in commercial and open source settings. The purpose of a Commercial Use article is to document and assess cases where functional programming was used in a real world setting. We are interested [...]