Let's Get Functional

Last week I watched Harold Abelson's introductory SICP lecture, courtesy of Google Video. SICP is short for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is a much copied course given at MIT, and the title of Abelman and Sussman's now classic introductory text to Computer Science. Besides the video lectures, the complete text is available from the above link online. Thank-you!

Talk about insightful! This is what Computer Science is really about. Probably more advanced than most undergraduates can cope with, I am taking the time to look at these classic texts because I suspect that functional programming (FP) is about to become much more important.

Why? Besides the intrinsic pleasure in learning and extending oneself, multi-core CPUs are starting to go main-stream, and I believe that FP is our best hope to take advantage of a new age of parallel hardware.

So I plan to brush up by going through some / most of SICP (and doing the exercises), before moving on to one or more of Haskell (especially for monads), OCaml, and F#.

SICP is draws many examples from mathematics, so with my background it looks very inviting. Others may prefer How To Design Programs, another freely available text.

* * *

Abelson says that when you look into a computer language, you should ask:

• What are the primitives?
• What are the means of combination?
• What are the means of abstraction?
  

The primitives are the "building blocks"; the means of combination are the ways of putting the primitives together; and the means of abstraction are ways of building composites (out of primitives and other composites) when the primitives are insufficient. If the composites are then indistinguishable from the primitives, you have something truly powerful.

This prompted an interesting thought the following day:

Do these criteria also apply to computer applications?

More on this later ...