A friend of mine and I were having a discussion regarding currying and partial function application in Javascript, and we came to very different conclusions as to whether either were achievable. I came up with this implementation of Function.prototype.curry, which was the basis of our discussion: Function.prototype.curry = function() { ...
A y-combinator is a comp-sci concept from the "functional" side of things. Most programmers don't know much at all about them, if they've even heard about them. What is a y-combinator? How do they work? What are they good for? Are they useful in procedural languages? ...
One of the blogs I read has been going over the fundamentals of Functional programming lately, and it's gotten me a bit more interested. Then, someone posted a question here that seems like a good fit for recursion/functional programming, which got me thinking about Functional languages again. I'd like to learn one, but now I need to p...
I've been trying to get into F# on and off for a while but I keep getting put off. Why? Because no matter which 'beginners' resource I try to look at I see very simple examples that start using the operator ->. However, nowhere have I found as yet that provides a clear simple explanation of what this operator means. It's as though it...
Joel Spolsky praise compiled version of program. How are with the functional programming? What are compilers for functional languages? ...
Being a C# developer since version 1.0, F# has captured my free time for the past few weeks. Computers are now sold with 2, 4 .. Cores and multi-threading is not always simple to accomplish. At the moment I see that F# has great potential for complicated and or heavy workloads. Do you think that F# will (once RTM) become an important p...
Is there a functional language that has good support and tools for building web services? I've been looking at Scala (which compiles to the JVM and can use the Java libraries) and F# (which is .NET), but these are young and have some inefficiencies. Scala in particular doesn't support tail-call elimination except in self-recursive func...
I was reading Andrew Kennedy's blog post series on units of measurement in F# and it makes a lot of sense in a lot of cases. Are there any other languages that have such a system? Edit: To be more clear, I mean the flexible units of measurement system where you can define your own arbitrarily. ...
Several questions about functional programming languages have got me thinking about whether XSLT is a functional programming language. If not, what features are missing? Has XSLT 2.0 shortened or closed the gap? ...
I understand what a Y Combinator is (those who don't should go here), but I don't understand this example of a "novel" YC, from the Wikipedia page: Yk = (L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L L) where: L = λabcdefghijklmnopqstuvwxyzr. (r (t h i s i s a f i x e d p o i n t c o m b i n a t o r)) How does this work? ...
I've been thinking about exploring functional programming. I'm not even sure what the benefits might be, but I'm curious, and want to learn more. The languages I work with currently are all procedural (python, c#, etc). What's the best language to start with? ...
I'm new to Ruby, and I'm trying the following: mySet = numOfCuts.times.map{ rand(seqLength) } but I get the 'yield called out of block' error. I'm not sure what his means. BTW, this question is part of a more general question I asked here. ...
Are there any decent tutorials for setting up F# in Visual Studio 2005? Everything I have found points at VS2008. ie: 'F# projects' under projects, etc. ...
The CPU architecture landscape has changed, multiple cores is a trend that will change how we have to develop software. I've done multi-threaded development in C, C++ and Java, I've done multi-process development using various IPC mechanisms. Traditional approaches to using threads doesn't seem to make it easy, for the developer, to ut...
Yesterday, I asked this question and never really got an answer I was really happy with. I really would like to know how to generate a list of N unique random numbers using a functional language such as Ruby without having to be extremely imperative in style. Since I didn't see anything I really liked, I've written the solution I was lo...
Are there any real world applications written in the clean programming language? Either open-source or proprietary. URL: http://clean.cs.ru.nl/ ...
What is the added value for learning F# when you are already familiar with LISP? ...
What do you think the benefits of functional programming are? And how do they apply to programmers today? What are the greatest differences between functional programming and OOP? ...
I know there is a list-comprehension library for common lisp (incf-cl), I know they're supported natively in various other functional (and some non-functional) languages (F#, Erlang, Haskell and C#) - is there a list comprehension library for Scheme? incf-cl is implemented in CL as a library using macros - shouldn't it be possible to us...
Are there any good examples (websites or books) around of how to build a full text search engine in F#? ...