"Fold" is a programming concept, a common name for a particular higher-order function that is widely used in functional programming languages. It's a fairly simple thing, but in practice I think of it as representing the outer limit of concepts a normal programmer can reasonably be expected to grasp in day-to-day work. What is fold?… Continue reading Fold: at the limit of comprehension
Tag: yeti
Feedback on “Four MLs (and a Python)”
My last post got an unprecedented amount of attention after appearing on the popular site Hacker News. It spent about 14 hours on the front page there and got almost 11,000 unique visitors that day — a fair way above my usual daily average, for this whole blog, of about a hundred. I combed through… Continue reading Feedback on “Four MLs (and a Python)”
Four MLs (and a Python)
I wrote a small command-line text processing program in four different ML-derived languages, to try to get a feel for how they compare in terms of syntax, library, and build-run cycles. ML is a family of functional programming languages that have grown up during the past 40 years and more, with strong static typing, type… Continue reading Four MLs (and a Python)
Conversing with the author of the Yeti programming language
I'm a great fan of the Yeti programming language, a JVM-based functional language which I think offers an irresistible combination of easy, fluent syntax with rigorous typechecking and good interoperability and performance. Yeti is written by one developer, Madis Janson. I dropped him a note with a few questions about the origin of and his… Continue reading Conversing with the author of the Yeti programming language
Yertle: an RDF/Turtle library in Yeti
I wrote a little while back about the Yeti programming language and the most pleasant time I was having with it, learning and re-learning some functional programming idioms. One of the first things I set about writing—because I could think of a use for it and it seemed like a nice thing to make—was a… Continue reading Yertle: an RDF/Turtle library in Yeti
Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
Twenty years ago, as a maths-and-computing undergraduate at the university of Bath, I was introduced to functional programming using the ML language by the excellent Julian Padget. We undergrads were set the traditional assignment of writing a sed-like text processor in ML, and found it first baffling and then, if we were lucky, rather exciting.… Continue reading Functional programming and the joy of learning something again
The Breakfast Post 