Simon Peyton Jones is smartest, nicest and most infectiously-enthusiastic people in the whole of computing. So I'm thrilled to be learning from him this week as he joins me to talk about his long history of pushing #FP & #Haskell to the state of the art; his present work for Epic Games, formalizing Functional Logic Programming with #Verse; and his vision for the future, raising the bar for computing education right from primary schools. ❤️
If you are into programming languages, learning Ocaml (or other ML dialect like StandardML) makes a lot of sense, it's helpful for reading papers, watching conference talks, understanding basics of type theory, going through PL courses and all other fancy stuff.
Here is a good introductionary course on OCaml and functional programming:
We are organizing the FP Dag aka Dutch Functional Programming Day on Friday the 5th of January in Delft. People from neighboring countries are also very welcome to join!
The (soft) registration deadline is on the 22th of December (next Friday), so get your tickets soon!
A vexing habit of #IT practice book authors (the non-academic types) who dabble in #FP is their propensity to invent their own seemingly "intuitive" terms for long-established concepts of #mathematics: monoid, functor, applicative, monad, category, ....
Good analogies are acceptable in instruction, and incisive examples more so. But usurping existing, general mathematical concepts by anointing them with one's own concocted lay terms is uncomely. Such conduct pollutes the namespace.
The reason why a mathematical term seems aloof is because its inventor (a bona fide mathematician) struggled, long and hard, to abstract out a fundamental, general concept from many specific instances.
The least we should do is to study the general principle the mathematician worked hard to uncover. Trying to displace that established, general principle with dumbed-down, specialised, lay terms is just rolling back progress.
The series of articles titled “My Scala Story” is pretty cool, worth a read 🥰
Interesting to see how many came to #Scala for mostly the same reasons — having fun with #FP 💪👾
I wish Scala was a simpler language because it was many people's first encounter with functional programming and it seems that it left a bad taste on them because of having too much features. People seem to relate their experience in Scala to functional programming in general.
Don't get me wrong. I prefer Scala in overall than any other JVM language (including Kotlin). But it has the same issue with the C++ that everyone uses a different subset of it.