Contents tagged with Orcas
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Visual Studio 2008 and F#
Once I downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2008 Team System in this laptop, one of the first things I did was to install F# to see how well it worked in the shiny new IDE. It worked without any hassle and to celebrate I wrote a typical business example: get the average salary of a group of employees.
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First class functions and currying
The paradigm behind functional programming says that everything can be solved creating and combining functions. Mathematical functions that is, like in "a transformation that takes values from a domain and map them to a codomain". For example, the domain of the length function is the set of all possible character strings and its codomain are the positive integers, the sin function has as domain all the angles and as codomain the reals between -1 and 1. A couple of function definitions in F#:
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Video resources for getting your feet wet with functional programming
Since, by pure coincidence, I learnt some LISP and functional programming. languages like Haskell have intrigued me. Now, this kind of academic interests happen to have practical ramifications that may be of interest to many of you. For example, C# 3.0 will have features like lambda functions and type inference which are abilities brought from functional languages, furthermore, Orcas LINQ, the new proposal for integrating generic queries into C# and VB.NET semantics, is a direct application of functional concepts. This video is a fascinating conversation on the relevance of such concepts for solving actual problems like using the potential of multi-core CPUs or handling concurrency in transparent ways, people like Anders Hejlesberg feature on the video, so it's worth downloading. After watching the video I think many of you will want to learn some more about functional languages and, from the many available options, may be the closest one is F#, which was created at Microsoft Research and runs inside Visual Studio, I suggest to start with this very gentle video which is an eye opener, later on you can watch Don Syme (the creator of F#) talking about the ideas behind the language here and then he shows us the language here (although for starters I prefer the Flying Frog Video). Happy lambda programming!