The beauty of clean syntax and deep abstraction is an often overlooked feature of functional programming. As they say, people come to functional programming for the concurrency but stay for the beautiful code (actually, I just made that up). Also included: POPL 2009, S#arp and functional unit testing.
Blog - Matthew Podwysocki’s Series on Functional Unit Testing
In this eight part series Matthew covers unit testing in Haskell from the basics setting up HUnit to the details of writing purely functional tests.
This series is the only place where I’ve seen functional programming unit testing talked about with any significant depth. While in writing this series Matthew used Haskell, it and F# share much in common and it’s obvious that he worked hard to make his posts apply to both. I consider it a must read for anyone thinking about taking functional software engineering seriously.
Although he has finished the series, I hope that in the future he takes some time to focus on unit testing in F# specifically. I’ve yet to see topics such as mocking or ensuring referential transparency by test covered.
Transcription - POPL 2009 Grand Challenges Panel Summary
This panel was lead by such research giants as Simon Peyton Jones, Xaveir Leroy, Kathryn McKinley, Greg Morrisett and Arvind. In it they discuss where programming language development is heading and the factors driving us there. Well worth the read for anyone interested in programming language evolution.
Blog - Mark Needham’s F# vs C# vs Java: Collection Parameters
In this post Mark compares list operations in F#, C# and Java. It’s striking to see how far we have come in terms of clean, concise syntax. Actually, it seems kind of reminiscent of evolution of man posters.
Blog - Jafar Husain’s F#: Real Sharp
When working in F# over a long period it’s easy to forget that one of the best things about it is how it’s concise syntax and deep abstractions make your code so much easier to understand and beautiful to look at. In his post Jafar reminds us of this by contrasting C# with F# samples.
Software – S#arp Architecture Beta 1.0 Available
S#arp Architecture promises to make building web applications much easier by making much of the glue we currently use in ASP.NET web applications obsolete.
I am a big fan of inversion of control and it is something that comes very natural in functional programming languages. I hope to see some examples with S#arp Architecture and F# internals at some point in the near future.