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Archive for November 27th, 2003

As my niece would say, “Windy!

Thursday, November 27th, 2003

As my niece would say, “Windy! Windy!” There’s a wind advisory in effect until the morning — at Clover Airfield the winds are N20 gusting to 30 MPH. I had to move my lawn chairs and potted plant to a leeward side of the house!

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Via λ the Ultimate:

Thursday, November 27th, 2003

Via λ the Ultimate: Why Functional Programming Matters. A wonderful paper (despite its age) touching on lazy evaluation, functional programming patterns, and uses as examples numerical differentiation and alpha-beta pruning. Abstract:

As software becomes more and more complex, it is more and more important to structure it well. Well-structured software is easy to write, easy to debug, and provides a collection of modules that can be re-used to reduce future programming costs. Conventional languages place conceptual limits on the way problems can be modularised. Functional languages push those limits back. In this paper we show that two features of functional languages in particular, higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, can contribute greatly to modularity. As examples, we manipulate lists and trees, program several numerical algorithms, and implement the alpha-beta heuristic (an algorithm from Artificial Intelligence used in game-playing programs). Since modularity is the key to successful programming, functional languages are vitally important to the real world.

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