Imperative vs functional programming. It's a debate that goes back to the birth of high level languages---Fortran vs Lisp. In later years, it was retreaded as object-oriented vs function programming (OOP vs FP)---OOP having become the (massively) dominant software development paradigm. And, I'm a fully paid up member. I embraced Object Pascal via Delphi 1 on 1995 and have been on the train ever … [Read more...]
The rise of functional programming
Yes, I know functional programming has been around since the 1950s. And, yes---Excel users are functional programmers. There's nothing particularly new to see here. Or is there? There's been sustained hype around functional languages for a few years now. Yet they have failed to break into the mainstream. Languages such as Haskell, Clojure and F# remaining frustratingly niche. The top ten … [Read more...]