Thoughts on Functional Programming Podcast

In this episode, I read excerpts from Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes. Does it answer the question of what is functional programming and why is it powerful?

Out of the Tar Pit came out 14 years ago and it was a big influence on my thinking. I’ve thought a lot about it and I want to share some extensions and refinements of the ideas in the paper. Specifically, I hope to present a more objective definition of complexity and refine the idea of Essential vs. Accidental complexity.

In this episode, I read excerpts from Out of the Tar Pit, a classic paper in the functional programming community.

I try to define software architecture, both in the large and in the small.

We read one of the great articles by Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk.

In this first episode of season 3, we analyze a great paper called Lisp: A language for stratified design.

I’m taking a break to retool for Season 3, which will start in the new year. I also give an update on Grokking Simplicity. I am working on Chapter 7.

Bruno Ribeiro asked a great question about the practical uses of monads. Are they useful? Why are they used so much in Haskell? In this episode, we briefly go over the history of monads in Haskell and how they allow you to do imperative programming in a pure functional language.