functional

[ljplicease]

Slow News Day: Backhoe Caught In Tide.

Rarely when looking at dusty old slides from old talks on the web do I get excited. But I think this one on functional programming in Perl would have been interesting (I know I'm weird). I have always been intrigued by functional programming since we studied Standard ML in my survey of programming languages at the U of A. I'm always seeing cool new (to me) and different ways to do things in different languages, but I usually come back to Perl mainly because I already know how to do most of what I want to do in Perl (it may not always be the most CPU time efficient, but for me it is almost always the most programmer time efficient). This isn't so bad because Perl has borrowed a lot of ideas from other programming languages, including functional programming languages ones, like proper closures. So learning a new language enough to get some ideas, but not to stay can actually be worth my time, because I can use those ideas in my Perl code. Next on my list of languages to dabble in are SNOBOL4 and Haskell, although I can't really explain why.