InfoQ Homepage Functional Programming Content on InfoQ
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Interview: Ted Neward on Present and Past Languages
In this interview filmed during QCon London 2008, Ted Neward, author of "Effective Enterprise Java", talks about languages, statical, dynamical, objectual or functional. He dives into Java, C#, C++, Haskell, Scala, VB, and Lisp, to name some of them, comparing the benefits and disadvantages of using one or another.
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Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele on Concurrency and Language Design
An interview recorded at JAOO, Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele talk about concurrency in language design. Anders Hejlsberg is the chief architect of C#, creator of Turbo Pascal, and former chief architect of Delphi. Guy Steele is the creator of Scheme and is currently working on Sun's Fortress, a programming language that focuses on parallelism and mathematics.
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Interview: Tom Preston-Werner on Powerset, GitHub, Ruby and Erlang
In this interview filmed at RubyFringe 2008, Tom Preston-Werner talks about how both Powerset and GitHub use Ruby and Erlang, as well as tools like Fuzed, god, and more.
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More Languages on top of Erlang Virtual Machine
Erlang virtual machine – BEAM – hosts an increasing number of languages. Reia, a Python/Ruby like scripting language and Lisp Flavoured Erlang have recently been released. Debasish Ghosh reflects on this trend while other authors try to outline other possible language variants inspired by Ruby or Haskell.
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Interview: Simon Peyton Jones on Programming Languages and Research Work
In this QCon London 2008 interview, computer scientist and researcher Simon Peyton Jones discusses properties of functional programming languages, and particularly Haskell, that have inspired some features in mainstream languages. He gives his opinion on the issues of syntax and language complexity and talks about some research work on subjects such as data parallelism and transactional memory.
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Presentation: Concurrency: Past and Present
In this presentation from QCon London 2008, Brian Goetz discusses the difficulties of creating multithreaded programs correctly, incorrect synchronization, race conditions, deadlock, Software Transactional Memory, the history of concurrency, alternatives to threads, Erlang, Scala, and recommendations for concurrency in Java.
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Using Closures to Improve API Design and Usage
Some APIs such as those that perform complex parsing often expose intermediate results via events. As Eric White demonstrates, closures can be used to greatly simplify calling these APIs.
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F# Update: MonoDevelop, a New Book, and a New CTP
Though still officially just a research project, the excitement over F# continues unabated. In today's roundup, we take a brief look at what's new for F#.
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Iterators for VB
Visual Basic's Paul Vick recently revealed a proposal to add iterators in a yet named version. While meant to address the same use cases as C#'s yield return statement, the proposal looks more like something out of a function programmer's playbook.
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Lambda Expression Improvements for VB
For VB developers it is a toss-up for the most frustrating thing about anonymous functions. Paul Vick is currently discussing two of them, anonymous subroutines and multi-line anonymous functions.
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Erlang and Ruby Roundup: Vertebra, Scaling with Fuzed, Github
Recently a few popular Ruby projects have started using Erlang. We look at how EngineYard's Vertebra, Powerset's Fuzed and recently Github make use of Erlang.
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Article: Domain Specific Languages in Erlang
Erlang is mostly known for reliability and for its concurrency and scalability concepts. But did you know that Erlang is a language well suited for writing DSLs? Dennis Byrne shows you how.
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The multicore crises: Scala vs. Erlang
There has been a somewhat heated debate about Scala vs. Erlang on the blogosphere recently. The future will be multi-cored, and the question is how the multi-core crises will be solved. Scala and Erlang are two languages that aspire to be the solution, but they are a bit different. What are the pros and cons with their approaches?
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Vertebra: EngineYard's Next Generation Cloud Computing Platform
At RailsConf 2008, Ezra Zygmuntowicz announced Vertebra, a next generation cloud computing platform that builds on Erlang, Ruby and XMPP. We talked to Ezra to learn about Vertebra, which will soon be open sourced.
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Presentation: Erlang - software for a concurrent world
We get more and more cores in our CPUs, but does our software run linearly faster? In most cases - no. We've hit a trend change when it comes to faster CPUs. We'll get more and more cores, but each core will be slower as the number of cores increase. In his talk, Joe Armstrong introduces Erlang and the ideas of Concurrent Oriented Programming which is one way to solve the problem.