Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Next Meeting, Dec 4: Why FP Matters

Our next meeting is at 18:00 (6pm) December 4 2012 (2012/12/04) in
room CSC 2-49 in the Computer Science building at the University of Alberta.

Justin Bogner will be presenting the ideas from John Hughes' paper,
Why Functional Programming Matters. This paper, which dates from
1984, offers solid rationale for why functional programming is
relevant to the real world and makes points on how to structure
functional programs that are still very relevant and helpful today.

Have you ever noticed that functional programming is usually described
by what it doesn't have? Do you wonder how there being "no assignment
statements" and "no side effects" could possibly be an advantage in
real programs? In this talk we'll show how features enabled by these
constraints, notably higher order functions and lazy evaluation, make
significant contributions to modularity and composability. We'll go
through examples of these in order to illustrate the power that they
bring to languages such as Haskell.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Notes from OCaml Presentation

Many people attended! Justin agreed to give a talk about functional programming in general and the principles of functional programming for Dec.4th!

The slides ( PDF )  and source code to the slides may be found here:
https://github.com/abramhindle/ocaml-presentation ( PDF )