Every so often I see a question on SO which forces me to spend half an hour editing a really bad Wikipedia article. The article is now only moderately bad. In the part that bears on your question, I wrote as follows: In computer science, a function or expression is said to have a side … Read more
Docstrings are stored as metadata under the :doc key. This is probably the number 1 most apparent use of metadata. Return and parameter types can be optionally tagged with metadata to improve performance by avoiding the overhead of reflecting on the types at runtime. These are also known as “type hints.” #^String is a type … Read more
Actually, some schools already do it this way around. Where I study (University of Copenhagen), they teach SML in the first semester, as an intro to programming. Then they teach Java afterwards, as an intro to OOP. I think it works extremely well, and I agree with you it’s better than the other way around. … Read more
Its now 11 months after I originally asked this question. I’ve just started a new project to help beginners make the transition to clojure. Its called 4clojure, and it challenges you to solve fill-in-the-blank style interactive problems. 4Clojure.com
Let me explain my understanding without going into category theory: Functors and monads both provide some tool to wrapped input, returning a wrapped output. Functor = unit + map (i.e. the tool) where, unit = something which takes raw input and wraps it inside a small context. map = the tool which takes a function … Read more
This is the subtle difference between imperative and functional approach. With imperative, you can place return in any place of the function, while with functional the best way is to have clear and explicit exeecution paths. Some people (me including) prefer the latter approach in imperative programming as well, recognizing it as more obvious and … Read more
Use Scheme. It is one of the simplest and easiest languages in existence, and you will spend very little time learning enough of it to understand SICP. Once you understand SICP, you will see how the concepts apply in any language.
The great thing about clojure is you can attach the reporting to the data itself instead of the code that does the computing. This allows you to separate these logically distinct parts. Here is a chunk from my misc.clj that I find I use in just about every project: (defn seq-counter “calls callback after every … Read more
Prototyping. Prolog is dynamic and has been for 50 years. The compiler is liberal, the syntax minimalist, and “doing stuff” is easy, fun and efficient. SWI-Prolog has a built-in tracer (debugger!), and even a graphical tracer. You can change the code on the fly, using make/0, you can dynamically load modules, add a few lines … Read more
Dart has first-class functions and supports many functional programming constructs. Here are some examples of assigning functions to variables and of a curried function: main() { f1(x) => x * 2; // Define the function f1 var f2 = f1; // Assign f1 to the variable f2 print(f2(7)); // Feel free to call f2 like … Read more