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My next step: Mathematics and functional programming?
Hi!
First, a proper introduction. Im a 22 year old student from Sweden who have been programming on and off since I was 12, and at the moment Im studying "application development", at something called KY(basically a little less fancy university where you have 6 months of mandatory internship at some company).What we do at school is object oriented programming day in and day out for two and a half year, and during my summer break Im working with a iPhone-app. I would say that my understanding of the object oriented paradigm is steadily getting better and better.
Although I really enjoy this and never get bored doing it I have begun to think about what would be my next step, after i graduate October 2011.
Over the last couple of years I have stared to enjoy mathematics more and more and have been looking at functional programming(mainly Haskell) for a while and I feel that this is something I would be willing to spend a good portion of my life doing(among artist, record label owner, custom bicycle builder and rock star :-) ). Im interested to work with functional programming and to know math, not so much work with it.
So, I have a couple of questions.
A. What would be best choice to get the most out of a degree and get the deepest understanding about FP? A CS-bachelor with mainly math and functional programming courses(in Sweden Chalmers offers quite a lot in this subject) or a Mathematics bachelor with lots functional programming courses?
B. Should I work for a few years before I start studying again? On one hand I think It would be nice to get some real experience but on the other Im afraid that if I get to deep down in the OO-rabbit hole I would get stuck in it, have a harder time grasping all the, for me, abstract techniques and theorems behind FP or just get comfortable with the salary and refuse to start living as a poor student again ;-).
C. I know there is always exiting work for a good programmer, but how is it for a functional programmer?(I'm not limited by living in Sweden, I really want to work all over the world). Do you have to be among the best to get somewhere? Is there many jobs where you program a good portion in the FPparadigm etc etc.
D. Is the idea of studying a lot of math stupid since Its mostly for my personal interest? Would it be better to do a CS, have fun on the math-courses, and choose other courses, maybe software engineering stuff like that to broaden my OO-understanding?
And since Im a music nerd and have held your attention for this long I would like to offer a song as compensation for the long text :-)
I present; Tetragon - Fugue, on of the most awesome and epic song of all time.
Part 1/2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNlOuzNkF40
Part 2/2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9bXMtMIR-s
- ryanteo 16y agoHi, New to FP as well, and I like your list of interests =) Have you ever considered Clojure with Incanter? http://data-sorcery.org/
- EgeBamyasi 16y agoNot until now, thanks for the tip! :-)
- gtani 16y agoSomebody observed (around here or reddit?) recently that there are no unemployed mathematicians. By that, s/he probably meant statistics/probability, linear algebra and diff EQ's as good things to be good at: http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-machine-learning-2nd-ed.html http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-m... ===================== FP, there's pretty strong interest in erlang, ocaml, haskell, F#, scala , clojure. Also scheme/CL . http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805429/learning-scala-or-haskell http://stackoverflow.com/questions/805429/learning-scala-or-... http://www.slideshare.net/brweber2/functional-concepts-for-oop-developers-presentation http://www.slideshare.net/brweber2/functional-concepts-for-o... http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/what-killed-lisp-could-kill-haskell-as-well/ http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/what-killed-lisp-coul... http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/jun-10/functional-programming-languages http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/jun-10/functional-programming-la...
- EgeBamyasi 16y agoThank you for the links, although I already know the basics of FP(or Haskell at least, good enough to solve most of the Project Euler problems I've been able to do with OO) and at this moment Haskell seems to be the best tool for learning FP for me so Im going to stick with it :-). And if I know one FP-language really well would't it be just like with procedural programming languages, trivial to pick up a new language? What Im after is a full understanding of what happens "under the hood", I've read some articles about lambda calculus, higher order functions, monads etc. but I get lost in all the math and abstract thinking.