InfoQ Homepage Functional Programming Content on InfoQ
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New Scala Tutorials for Java Developers
Scala continues to make news with two more tutorial series, one by Ted Neward at IBM’s developerWorks and one by Daniel Spiewak on his blog.
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WPF and F#
Yesterday we told you about using PHP.NET with Silverlight. The GUI framework for Silverlight, WPF, represents the future of Windows development. So it is understandable that F# developers would be looking at it with a keen eye as well.
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Why Scala?
Scala is one of the newer languages for the JVM, but why would developers want to choose Scala over Java? There are many reason, but for many Scala provides many of the language features of Ruby in a statically-typed environment.
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Mads Torgersen: C# Futures
Floyd interviews Mads Torgersen at JAOO and they discuss the future of C# and the LINQ additions.
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Duck Typing and Protocols vs. Inheritance
A recent debate on the RubyTalk list asked where to use is_a? vs respond_to? This highlights situations where objects respond to the same interface, but don't share any superclasses. We look at this debate and solutions in other languages such as Smalltalk, Erlang, and Scala.
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Borrowing Functional APIs from F#
The Common Language Specification ensures that any conforming .NET language can access libraries created by any other language. This means imperative languages like VB and C# can call functional libraries created primarily for F#. In fact, many can be converted directly into C# code.
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Designing for flexibility and robustness: Asynchronous message model, OOP and Functional Programming
According to Pragmatic Programmers it is preferable in OOP to avoid design based on returning values. Michael Feathers argues that it may also be better to use the asynchronous message model that might be instrumental for improving adaptability and robustness. This maps well to the Erlang model though opposing some of the principles of pure functional programming.
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Article: Beyond Foundations of F#
Since Robert Pickering published Foundations of F# in May, the language has grown significantly. Besides adding a host of new features, it is being moved from a research project to a fully supported, production-grade release. We asked Robert to discuss some of the new features in F#.
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F# to Be Integrated With Visual Studio
Somasegar has announced that F# will be integrated with Visual Studio, joining Managed C++, C#, and Visual Basic as a first class on the .NET platform.
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Longjumps, Tailcalls, Tuples for the JVM
This summer, John Rose made a series of posts described as "some exciting articles about the future of the JVM," including long jumps, tail calls and tuples. These could be folded into the Java language, but can also be seen as important for supporting other languages on the JVM, including both functional and dynamic languages.
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Erlang's Mnesia - a distributed DBMS for highly scalable apps
Not every application has the scalability requirements of Google, Flickr or Amazon, however the ideas behind the Mnesia DBMS are compelling: a fast, in-process DBMS that takes advantage of concurrency, with the ability to replicate tables across distributed nodes for high scalability and fault tolerance.
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Limitations of Closures in Visual Basic
In part 6 of his series on closures, Jared Parsons takes about some of the limitations of closures in Visual Basic. While it is not explicitly called out, many of these limitations may also apply to C#.
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Performance Problems with Lambdas
The LINQ Cookbook reveals some performance issues when using lambdas instead of traditional functions.
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The Futures of Ruby Threading
Ruby's thread system is about to undergo big changes in Ruby 1.9, possibly moving from user space threads to kernel threads. Or not. A recent interview with Matz and Sasada Koichi shows some new ideas that are considered. We take a look at the different possible future Ruby threading systems.