Hitchhiker's Guide to Functional Programming
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The document summarizes the history of computing and functional programming through key figures such as Alonzo Church who invented the λ-calculus, Alan Turing who created the Turing machine, John von Neumann who established modern computer architecture, John McCarthy who created the Lisp language based on λ-calculus, and Edsger Dijkstra who argued against using GOTO statements. It then discusses how features like mutation and pointers were added to languages but can be harmful, and compares recursion in functional programming to GOTO.
Hitchhiker's Guide to Functional Programming
- 1. Hitchhiker's Guide to Functional Programming
- 2. Significantly trivialized history of computing
- 3. Alonzo Church Researched decidability of algorithms and invented a generic model of calculation – the λ-calculus (early 1930s*) *see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
- 4. Alan Turing Created a model of a generic computer – the Universal Turing machine (ca. 1936*) *see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
- 5. John von Neumann Created the architecture of modern computers based on the Universal Turing machine (early 1940s*) *see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
- 6. And PL features exploded... GOTO, mutation, pointers, null refs, exceptions, floating point numbers, inheritance, interfaces, threads… See http://blog.ploeh.dk/2015/04/13/less-is-more-language-features/ for a discussion of harmful PL features
- 7. John McCarthy Created Lisp language based on the λ-calculus and featuring macros (ca. 1958*) *see http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html
- 8. Edsger Dijkstra Made a case against the GOTO statement (in 1968*) *see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
- 9. A case against mutation It’s about time to ban the next offender
- 10. What’s wrong with this code? int sum = 0; for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) { if (i % 2 == 0) sum += i * i; } System.out.println(sum);
- 12. Erik Meijer Recursion is GOTO of functional programming
- 13. ● λ-Calculus is a model of computation ● Program is data, generic evaluation algorithm ● Turing machine is a model of a computer ● Program is algorithm Turing machine and λ-calculus are proven equivalent in terms of computability Summary
- 14. Learn More (click on the images)
- 15. Questions?