In the Mayan calendar, 2012 is suppose to be a year of deep cleansing and rebirth for the world. In this spirit, I’ve been branching out into new fields and broadening my conceptual view of software development. The more I learn about programming fundamentals, the closer I get to a notion of which is considered “programming nirvana”. When I first started listening to people about this concept, I was very skeptical. All I was hearing was “blah blah no-variables blah higher-order-functions blah”. Like any programmer, my brain starts crashing as soon as I hear the statement that a language can be productive without variables. How is it possible to make anything meaningful without some internal state within methods and classes? Well, the answer to this is rather complex and outside the scope of this posting. The vehicle driving these concepts is called functional programming (FP), and it’s intrinsic highly abstract nature is usually very difficult for programmers to swallow. Going into the future though, I hope to post more about functional programming here. However, the real purpose of this article is to acknowledge some of the most astoundingly brilliant scientific minds that are changing my industry. I tip my hat to these gentlemen and scholars:

Haskell

Haskell B. Curry
Father of Haskell foundations		 Simon Peyton-Jones
Implemented Haskell GHC compiler		 Erik Meijer
Major Supporter and an amazing teacher

FP Geniuses

Rich Hickey
Creator of Clojure and FP pioneer		 Joe Armstrong
Erlang founder		 Martin Odersky
The brain behind Scala
Don Syme
Inventor of F#		 John McCarthy
Lisp and FP pioneer		 Conal Elliott
Conceptualized Functional Reactive Programming

Honestly, I cannot state my respect for the above individuals enough! They have invested an enormous amount of personal time into an ideal that they are crazily passionate about. Each one of them want to make software development better from both the coder’s standpoint and platform perspective. As a teaser to these principles, below is a video of Simon Peyton-Jones and Erik Meijer talking about their view of coding nirvana:

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