Ralf Lämmel: Going bananas

As most of you know so well, Banana is functional programming slang for "fold"—an application of the catamorphic recursion scheme most widely known in the higher-order list processing tradition of Bird-Meertens Formalism and the Squiggol community. Erik Meijer used to be known as the "banana man" because of his early research on the subject; he also co-authored the seminal paper with theoretical (categorical) foundations on the subject. Incidentally, the paper used the notation of so-called "banana brackets" (instead of using the plain string "foldr"), which sort of explains why we sometimes say bananas. There is no shortage of crazy paper titles on the subject, by the way: "Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes, and Barbed Wire," "Bananas in Space: ...," "Dealing with large bananas," "Boxes go bananas: ...," "See more through lenses than bananas," etc.



See Ralf going bananas in his latest excellent video lecture on Channel 9:

Low res MP4
High res MP4

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