July 2009
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Chris Donnan

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Chris Donnan : Programming – Brooklyn Style

software, trading, family, fun

Monads and my many language road to more functional programming

So – I am deep into Erlang (still learning for > 1.5 years), Getting into Clojure (new) and getting into Haskell (a few months now). I have decided to spurn the OCaml/ F# branch of the world at least for a little while…

Anyhow – Erlang is the functional language I have the most experience with, yet next to Haskell – the LANGUAGE feels weak. Erlang the language + OTP + the Erlang VM runtime is amazing but the Language itself is not as lovely as Haskell. When I am typing C# code, I am finding myself more and more functionally minded. For a few years now I have felt the move to functional programming on me. C# has had great improvements – but it still feels way too brittle and verbose next to Haskell.

I recently read these articles:

Haskell for C# Programmers Part 2: Understanding IO.

Haskell for C# Programmers Part 3: Visualizing Monads

I found them helpful understanding monads as someone with a large C# experience. I also found this one:

Monads as containers very helpful. I will admit to having read dozens of articles on monads and just now really getting to a point where I think I can actually perceive the need for writing one of my own.

Functional programming style has made great differences in my personal style in several languages. I like programming languages and I am literate in many. Seek the monad, but 1st seek to understand the primitive bits of functional programming and it will aide your programming in any language.


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