functional programming

So suppose like many here (?) you are a believer in the promise of functional programming. And suppose more and more FP features and FP languages are becoming mainstream.

Does this mean nothing remains to be done? Certainly not! Among the recurring topics that come up for discussion here are support for concurrency, utilizing GPUs, FRP, dependent typing, fine grained control of effects, native support for web programming and the web stack of technologies and protocols and more.

So what would be your priority list?

Here's another interesting project targeting the assembly language of the web...

The good news is that Jeremy Gibbons is writing a book on Patterns in Functional Programming. Even better news is that he is blogging about it as he goes along!

Those unfamiliar with the topic may want to begin at the beginning, though I personally just rummaged around.

Some may enjoy going to the papers rather than the blog, or even better to the LtU discussions about many of them.

For those out there still coming to grips with some of what PHP 5.3 has to offer, I'd suggest checking out this new article from Shameer about using lambdas and closures along with some examples putting them into action.

Alvaro Videla has written up a response to Wade Arnold's Scala's easier than PHP post and some of the points he doesn't agree with him on.

http://briancarper.net/blog/clojure-from-a-ruby-perspective

Fogus' recent article "clojure.rb" speculates about why there seem to be so many Ruby users adopting Clojure.

As a Ruby user who adopted Clojure, I figured I'd write about my experiences.

Brian Carper

The Monad Zipper by Bruno Oliveira and Tom Schrijvers

Limitations of monad stacks get in the way of developing highly
modular programs with effects.

This pearl demonstrates that Functional
Programming’s abstraction tools are up to the challenge. Of
course, abstraction must be followed by clever instantiation: Huet’s
zipper for the monad stack makes components jump through unanticipated
hoops.

Conal Elliott's weblog post from January, Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm?, makes the case that the kind of coupling to state which Haskell programs making use of the IO monad have, raise problems of the same sort that led to pure functional programming in the first place.

Conal then goes on to sketch, with reference to his work on FRP and denotational design, some ideas about where purity should be leading language design.

The manuscript of the book Computational Semantics with Functional Programming by Jan van Eijck and Christina Unger, as well as related software, is available online.

The introductory chapters are probably going to be unnecessary for LtU readers, but once things get going there is a lot to learn here if you are interested in formal semantics of natural language, especially in the Montague-style.

Thinking Functionally in Ruby is a talk that British Ruby developer Tom Stuart gave at a recent London Ruby Users Group meeting.