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Friday, January 11, 2008 12:06 AM

The Marvels of Monads

If the word "continuation" causes eyes to glaze over, then the word "monad" induces mental paralysis.  Perhaps, this is why some have begun inventing more benign names for monads. These days, monads are the celebrities of programming
Posted by wesdyer | 34 Comments
Saturday, December 22, 2007 6:51 AM

Continuation-Passing Style

There are some technical words that cause quite a stir even amongst geeks.  When someone says the word "continuation" , people's eyes glaze over and they seek the first opportunity to change the subject.  The stir is caused because
Posted by wesdyer | 9 Comments
Thursday, March 01, 2007 7:44 AM

Immutability, Purity, and Referential Transparency

How often do you write code that just works? It seems to happen so rarely that I find myself suspicious if code does just work. When was the last time that you wrote a non-trivial program that had no compile errors on the first try and then ran fine as
Posted by wesdyer | 32 Comments
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:11 PM

The Virtues of Laziness

It seems that I riled some people up with my blog post yesterday. After some thought, I think the primary reason that there was some backlash is because some people feel that I violated one of the sacred principles of FP: lists are *the* data structure.
Posted by wesdyer | 22 Comments
Monday, February 12, 2007 7:41 PM

Why all the love for lists?

One of the things that I have noticed when participating in interviews with potential candidates is that most candidates have a favorite data structure. Presumably this is the data structure that they feel the most comfortable with. The problem is that
Posted by wesdyer | 15 Comments
Monday, February 05, 2007 6:12 PM

Memoization and Anonymous Recursion

Keith Farmer brought it to my attention that there is at least a little confusion about how closures work. Hopefully, I can help shed a little light on the subject. The question is why doesn't the following code actually memoize fib in the call to Test?
Posted by wesdyer | 11 Comments
Friday, February 02, 2007 7:17 PM

Anonymous Recursion in C#

Recursion is beautiful and lambdas are the ultimate abstraction. But how can they be used together? Lambdas are anonymous functions and recursion requires names. Let's try to define a lambda that computes the nth fibonacci number. Func<int, int>
Posted by wesdyer | 34 Comments
Monday, January 29, 2007 8:36 PM

Currying and Partial Function Application

When I first heard the term Currying , I thought immediately of tasty Thai and Indian food. To my dismay, I found that the conversation was not about wonderful spices but rather about transforming a function that takes n arguments into a function that
Posted by wesdyer | 6 Comments
Friday, January 26, 2007 1:44 AM

Function Memoization

One of my favorite pastimes is playing games. No not XBox 360, PS3, or Wii games nor other computer games, but board games, card games, and other such games. It's probably because I'm from a large family - I have 8 siblings - and we would often spend
Posted by wesdyer | 17 Comments
Thursday, January 18, 2007 10:37 AM

Why Functional Programming is Important in a Mixed Environment

While my last post addressed how to go about learning to think functionally, it did not address why a programmer should embark on the journey in the first place. Why is learning to think functionally important, especially in a mixed environment like C#,
Posted by wesdyer | 11 Comments
Monday, January 15, 2007 9:45 PM

Thinking Functionally

Every programmer has a story about how he got his start. My own journey began at age 14 when I was bored to death while completing a second-year algebra assignment. My father who was working on the couch with a brand new laptop showed me that I could
Posted by wesdyer | 8 Comments
Friday, December 22, 2006 11:20 PM

Thus Quoth the Humble Programmer

I love Scheme! It is such a beautiful language. I was first introduced to it during college. At that time, I thought it was an interesting language but I didn't see the power of the language until later. That moment came when I experienced reading The
Posted by wesdyer | 6 Comments
 
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