Lambda the Ultimate

Former freelance classical musician, currently professional Perl programmer. Background in operations (system administration).

Awareness of functional programming came to me through Mark Jason Dominus' "Higher Order Perl." This has proved somewhat of a revelation; causing me to tackle Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, etc., and from there, have dabbled just a tince in "logic programming," through for example "The Reasoned Schemer" by Friedman, Byrd, et al.

Although not a mathematician myself by any stretch of the imagination, having gotten only as far as 2d year college math (calculus, matrix algebra), my recent introduction to the Lambda Calculus' power and elegance has lead me to reexamine programming, this time on a more profound level. My estimation of both the practice of programming, and programming language design, have altered accordingly. The net effect has been to expect, crave, and pursue a deeper logical grounding both for the languages I do program in, and the programs that I write in them.

Currently working through SICP and various other books on functional programming. It's hard to list all of these, other than to say "the usual suspects." Paul Graham did a nice brainwashing of me with his piece on the "Blub Paradox." Now I'm hooked ;).

Also reading "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming," partly on the recommendations of Brian Harvey (whose course at UC Berkeley I've been auditing online), and Peter Norvig (whose book on Lisp/AI I've been reading). So far I am enjoying reading it very much.