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Functional Programming For The Rest of Us
- ralph 20y agoWorth reading if you're new to FP. It's a shame the author used Java for explanations instead of C which is closer to the bare metal and would expose more of the internal workings.
- mojuba 20y agoI'd choose JavaScript instead, since it already has most of what he explained.
- ralph 20y agoI think you miss my point. I'm saying that in order to explain some of these things it's better to use a language like C that's close to the hardware and doesn't offer them natively in order that their implementation must be exposed. Using Javascript because the language already has most of the features would just be explaining the syntax of Javascript, akin to Knuth using Python instead of MMIX and his descriptions of sort becoming an explanation of how to use Python's sort; not how it works under the covers. :-) An older example is a good book, now downloadable, by Axel-Tobias Schreiner, the German translator of K&R, etc., that implements a C preprocessor in awk that adds OO features to C, thereby explaining how a language with the features built in, e.g. C++, implements them. Objekt-orientierte Programmierung mit ANSI-C: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf (English translation.)
- mojuba 20y agoAbsolutely agreed, and actually I wrote an email to the author yesterday saying roughly the same thing, although I didn't think about just C.
- ced 20y agoI only read the historical part, and I got caught by this line: "Nevertheless Alonzo had regular contacts with other Princeton inhabitants. Among them were Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Kurt Godel." Wow. Where can you find that today?
- dpapathanasiou 20y agoGoogle comes close (from Paul Tyma's blog): "At Google, you never know who your interviewers are going to be. If you say you're a Java or C++ expert that rates a 10 - you darn well better be - because you never know - your next interviewer could be Josh Bloch, Matt Austern, Guido van Rossum, or Ken Thompson." http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2007/03/howto-pass-silicon-valley-software.html http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2007/03/howto-pass-silicon-valley-software.html
- ced 20y agoApart from possibly Ken, none of them compares IMO to the Princeton list, not by a long-shot. I often wonder why there seems to be less scientific genius around, and there are three options: 1. Problems these days require teams (meh) 2. The geniuses are there, they just never get recognition until much later 3. They're off doing technical work rather than scientific research. I.e.: they do startups, not publish articles. Can you imagine that your project might be up against a modern-day Einstein? 4. I'm out of touch. Geniuses are still there, in plain sight.
- imp 20y agoI've thought the same thing myself and I usually assume that it's a combination of #2/#4. The geniuses are out there, and those who work directly with them know that they're geniuses, but they won't get wide-spread recognition until much later. Probably because they're working on ideas that won't (can't) be implemented until much later. Actually, it might be that there are many groups of geniuses out there, but only those whose work ends up being useful (depending on random future events) are later regarded as geniuses. Like the article said, the demand for computers didn't really increase until WWII.