Tag: Functional

Understanding the Y-Combinator with Racket

Understanding the Y-Combinator seems to be one of the functional programming right-of-passage things, and for good reason, it is fun. Not all of the articles out there spoke to me, so I took notes while coding it up in a way that I understood it.
My notes are attached in the form of a Scribble here How the Y Works, viewable here, and the source code version here y.
It is Racket, but it is really close to Scheme and if you wrote a couple of macros it would probably run on Clojure pretty easily.
The goal is for there to be no gaps in the code, it should be pretty obvious how each step was taken. Hand-coding it made it clear what was happening. This is what worked for me :).

Intel presentation about their new functional programming language

Via CUFP via Caml-list:

For five years Intel’s Programming Systems Lab (PSL) has been collaborating with an external partner on a new functional programming language designed for productivity on many-core processors. While the language is not yet public, this talk outlines motivations behind the language and describes our experiences in implementing it using a variety of functional languages. The reference interpreter is written in Haskell and compiled with GHC while PSL’s performance implementation is written in SML and compiled with Mlton. We have also generated Scheme code compiled with PLT Scheme as part of a prototyping effort.

2009 ICFP & Co-Hosted Event Videos

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 Workshop 2009, CUFP 2009, Haskell Symposium 2009, ICFP 2009, and Haskell Implementers Workshop 2009 events.
(via PLT)

Why should programmers care about currying in practice in Scheme?

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 I’ll just pick one class of examples. In FP, one is often passing around bundles of state in the form of parameters to a function.

Joe Marshall:

Your best bet would be to look at existing Scheme code. I found this example in the MIT Scheme loader: [click link for code]

Richard Cleis:

Currying permits repeated use of intermediate functions as an alternative to overtly managing arguments to a core function.

David Van Horn [on how to use the state monad in Scheme]:

You might have a look at these:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.functional/msg/2fde5545c6657c81
http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/monad-in-Scheme.html

Functional Java

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 of automated specification-based testing with ScalaCheck.

(via PLT)

Functional Objects

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 see Joshoua Bloch’s quotes scattered liberally about.
Basically it tells a story and makes an argument about how one might go about moving forward with programming, and it does well enough in both regards.