Comments on: Future of Programming is Functional Programming ?

By: Eugene Wallingford

Eugene Wallingford — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 18:33:07 +0000

I second recommendations above for Scheme, SICP, and Haskell. All will teach you much. Back when I dove deeper into functional programming, I found this article to be really useful:

http://www.md.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html

You’ll have to work your way through it slowly, but there are a lot of neat ideas there.

By: Swaroop C H

Swaroop C H — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 02:40:37 +0000

Thanks Ken! I’ll take a look

By: Ken Rawlings

Ken Rawlings — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 21:42:01 +0000

Not sure what happened with the formatting above. Here’s the raw URL to the link I posted:
http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2004/09/28/objective-caml-a-pythonic-diversion/

By: Ken Rawlings

Ken Rawlings — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 21:31:44 +0000

I concur with the endorsements of SICP — it’s an overwhelming book at times, but full of deep wisdom about functional programming as well as programming in general.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Scheme and Objective Caml, and feel that it’s worth exploring both. For me, Scheme is a great language for experimentation, and Objective Caml is a great language for application development. I also wrote a small summary of my positive and negative experiences with Objective Caml on my weblog a while back that might be worth looking at.

By: Swaroop C H

Swaroop C H — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:38:04 +0000

Cool! Sriram, you have written a post on FP long ago

Looks like I’m just late to the party

Anyway, I’ll be reading your blog post soon, thanks!

By: Sriram

Sriram — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:08:51 +0000

Have you seen this blog post from me? http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/sriram/archive/2004/10/14/28543.aspx . Read SICP – but learn Haskell too..probably the cleanest implementation of FP

By: Swaroop C H

Swaroop C H — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 16:58:15 +0000

Wow, Pramode, thanks a lot, your article is really useful!

By: Pramode

Pramode — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 16:27:19 +0000

Best way to start out in FP is with Scheme and the textbook
`Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs’ – I have
taught a bit of it in class (whatever little I understood) and
find it to be really great for intellectual nourishment. Most of
the Scheme stuff can be translated to straightforward Python
(http://linuxgazette.net/109/pramode.html).

By: Swaroop C H

Swaroop C H — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 06:10:40 +0000

Oh yeah, OCaml is supposed to be a very good FP. There are too many names to go through here – Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, Haskell, and even [F#](http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ilx/fsharp.aspx) (which by the way is now at 1.0 stage) and [Nemerle](http://nemerle.org/) (which runs on Mono)!

By: Premshree

Premshree — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 05:47:43 +0000

I’ve worked with OCaml and Scheme in the past. I haven’t used either of them for implementing anything big, nor do I know them well enough for me to be able to choose one.

However, there’s one thing that you might want to consider before choosing one: OCaml consists of object-oriented concepts, Scheme — most implementations — doesn’t. And *maybe* if you don’t want to feel comfortable right away, you should go for Scheme.