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.

This is a great Google Tech Talk on Functional Programming and GUI Development. These are of course 2 things that are near and dear to my programming heart.

The basic concepts are that I liked:

• Functional programming = value oriented programming
• UIs are visualizations of values.
• You expose the parameterization of the functions to users.
• You want to use the unix pipe concepts to pipe inputs/ outputs to each other.

Essentially, the difficult bit for me is that much of the work that I do is about passing around an ‘entity’, editing, maintaing and persisting its state. I am sure there is a good FP answer to this, but I need to see how to fit it into my mental development model.

If I view Excel as the de-facto FP app – I am sure that I can find a way to map my world to a more pure FP stance.

The things randomly rattling around in my brain – vaguely related are:

• Column oriented databases (Bigtable, HBase, etc)
• Google AppEngine’s data model – especially expando types (basically each row may have different or extra columns)
• I am increasingly interested in concepts from Lisp – like the fact that types are just lists of attributes.

Putting together those ideas gets you something like bigtable for persisting potentially sparse-ish, or versions of, or extended type hierarchies of values sets. Value sets are basically attribute lists.

All of that gives a different world than I have today. I cannot say where it is going for sure, but all of this gives me a scent of the next set of dominant paradigms. Learning, building, advancing, etc.

-Chris