Lambda the Ultimate

Dear all,

the proceedings of PLAN-X 2007, the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on
Programming Language Technologies for XML (held on January 20, 2007 in Nice, France, collocated with and just after POPL 2007) have been posted and are available for download (PDF): www.plan-x-2007.org

The 100-page volume contains eight research papers and four software demonstration descriptions. There should be something in there for everybody (who hangs out here, that is).

Enjoy,
—Torsten Grust (PLAN-X 2007 General Chair)

Hello,

I'm new here and this is my first post. :-)

I'm a software engineer, mostly with background in C, C++, Java, and PHP, but I have a strong interest in expanding my knowledge and learning other programming language paradigms. I've already looked through the "Getting Started" thread here, as well as wikipedia on topics like functional programming, monads, closures, haskell, lambda calculus, etc. However, I'm still having trouble understanding all the concepts. I get some things like erlang, scheme, half of lisp ;-), but others escape me completely.

So what I'm after is a extra-basic reference to such things. What exactly is the concept, why is it important, what benefit does it provide, an example of a real-world situation where it's helpful, etc. All boiled down to basic terminology and explanations. Is there such explanations online? Is there a "Programming language paradigms for Dummies" out there anywhere? :-)

Thanks,
- Jeremiah