Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast

In this episode, we read excerpts of Maurice Wilke’s 1967 ACM Turing Award lecture titled ‘Computing Then and Now’.

In this episode, I contemplate whether I am an early adopter or a pragmatist, and how that influenced my choice of Clojure. Does Clojure appeal to early adopters? Has it crossed the chasm?

In this episode, I read from Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO. We learn whether avoiding GOTOs makes your code better and how to make function calls fast.

In 1977, John Backus presented an algebraic vision of programming that departed from the von Neumann fetch-and-store semantics. This seminal paper has influenced functional programming in many ways. In this episode, I read excerpts from and comment on John Backus’s 1977 Turing Award Lecture paper Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs.

In SICP, the authors define a metacircular evaluator of Scheme written in Scheme to change the semantics of the language. Do we do stuff like that in real life? In this episode, I explore this listener question.

In this episode, I excerpt and comment on a seminal paper in programming language design, from all the way back in 1966, called The Next 700 Programming Languages.

What causes an API to cross the line into becoming a DSL? Is it really a ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ situation? I’ve been searching for an answer for years. And I think I found it in a paper I read recently for this podcast: Lisp: A language for stratified design. In this episode, we go over the main factor that makes an API a DSL: the closure property.

I’ve never been satisfied with the standard definition of ‘software design’. Is the term useful? What could it mean that is useful? In this episode, I talk about some definitions that I don’t agree with and explain my definition.