 Perl and the Lambda Calculus
started 11/13/2000; 7:13:01 AM - last post 11/22/2000; 12:20:08 AM
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Chris Rathman - Perl and the Lambda Calculus 
11/13/2000; 7:13:01 AM (reads: 538, responses: 2)
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Chris Rathman - Re: Perl and the Lambda Calculus
11/22/2000; 12:03:49 AM (reads: 534, responses: 0)
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Got a couple of notes from the author that he said he didn't mind if I posted. Here's the second note he sent about the Perl and Lambda posting what he had to say:
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Mark-Jason Dominus
Also, thank you very much for mentioning my book at
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/messagx346
However, your description is misleading. You said:
The article is part of Mark Dominus' Lambda page and is a preliminary discussion for his planned book on Perl Advanced Techniques Handbook. This isn't true. The book is going to have noting at all to do with lambda calculus. In fact, I'm going to try very hard to banish as much theory from the book as I can.
I think Perl programmers think that functional programming is something used only by gray-bearded professors in dusty offices in Universities, and is inapplicable to real applications. The Purpose of my book is to introduce functional techniques to Perl Programmers, and If I filled it up with a lot of lambda-calculus stuff, nobody would want to read it.
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Chris Rathman - Re: Perl and the Lambda Calculus
11/22/2000; 12:20:08 AM (reads: 571, responses: 0)
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Just a couple of quick comments to the author's corrections
This isn't true. The book is going to have noting at all to do with lambda calculus. In fact, I'm going to try very hard to banish as much theory from the book as I can. Personally, understanding the Lambda Calculus is more pertinent to my short term goals, so attempts at explaining the theory in a practical fashion are appealing to me. However, I do understand that most Perl programmers that I speak to are of the practical school, so it's probably not a bad thing to take that direction. I don't know that I would go as far as thinking that theory is not important, but the emphasis at the very least would need to be practical application to be appealing.
Being multi-paradigm, I don't think Perl will ever reach the purity of Functional Programming in the FP languages (ML, Haskell, etc). But it is interesting to see the lessons being applied. I'm kind of hoping that an emphasis is placed in this direction in Perl 6.
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