Tue 12 Jun 2007

Functional Programming In The Real World

Somewhat against the run of play, programming.reddit.com has been throwing up some very useful links lately. Today, somebody turned up this presentation by Howard Mansell of Credit Suisse from last year's Commercial Users of Functional Programming conference (the 2006 talks are here).

After writing some Python code lately that was very functional in style (using lazy infinite streams to produce successive results in the computation), I have been enjoying playing around in Haskell a bit more. I sort of learnt the language back in 2001, but never really had the time or inclination to play with it much. Now, I'm becoming a bit more hooked. Functional programming should appeal to me, after all — I'm a mathematician at heart! Twisting problems into a series of proof steps is fun, in many ways. I'm already reasonably competent in Scheme; adding another arrow to that quiver seems worth it.

What impresses me about this presentation, though, is how Credit Suisse started with a pragmatic approach (use Excel's formulas for most things) and then started extending further and further. However, some people had the intelligence to step back and realise they were inventing a functional language and there already were rather a lot of those. So they switched to working out how to leverage what already existed.

For a short presentation with no real "glitz" to it, these slides get the information across very well. It's a nice encouragement piece for anybody thinking about whether functional programming is relevant.

Topics: software/haskell