Lambda the Ultimate

Functional programming has had a profound impact on the development of mainstream languages such as C# or Java. We wanted to get a better sense of developer’s perceptions of functional programming, and also better understand which functional programming concepts are useful to developers. This paper reports the results of a preliminary survey on this topic.

The survey was sent to 100 programmers working at Microsoft, 19 responded, and of these only 14 were familiar with the term functional programming.

I will refrain from snarky remarks.

The Strange Loop conference is releasing their videos for the 2010 affair and one of possible interest to LtU is Chris Houser's talk on the expression problem. Dialogue about the expression problem is experiencing a renaissance these days and this talk does a nice job of explaining what it is, why it's a problem (not just in name only), and how Clojure avoids it.

Clojure's Solutions to the Expression Problem

full disclosure: I forgot to disclose that he mentions our book at the end. I'm not trying to sell copies here, so just stop at 44:55 to avoid mention of it altogether.