12Jan Functional Dreamers
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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
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| Haskell B. Curry Father of Haskell foundations |
Simon Peyton-Jones Implemented Haskell GHC compiler |
Erik Meijer Major Supporter and an amazing teacher |
FP Geniuses
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| Rich Hickey Creator of Clojure and FP pioneer |
Joe Armstrong Erlang founder |
Martin Odersky The brain behind Scala |
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| 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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Author: Jonathan Dunlap Jonathan is a veteran software architect, author of IsoHill, humanitarian, and has worked with Bigpoint Inc, CrowdStar, ePrize, and Microsoft. |
January 12th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Seems hardly fair to not include Don Syme!
January 12th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
@Rick, right you are! I’ve immediately hence added him to the list. I initially did not as I have not had the opportunity to look over his white-papers, but his reputation certainly proceeds him.
January 12th, 2012 at 9:37 pm
He’s not nearly as visible because he seems to prefer working hard over giving a lot of talks. However, I don’t think it would be a stretch to attribute much of Microsoft’s move towards functional programming to his work.
Thanks!
January 12th, 2012 at 10:48 pm
You left out David Turned. The originator of SASL and Miranda. Funny to see Rich Hockey but not John Mccarthy.
January 13th, 2012 at 9:04 am
I strongly recommend adding Alonzo Church who invented Lambda Calculus -which is the complete mathematical basis of functional programming- and John McCarthy who invented Lisp -which is the first language to use functional programming paradigm-, though popular Lisp dialects are multiparadigm, it was the beginning of all functional languages.
January 14th, 2012 at 12:19 am
I think you should also consider including the people who essentially created the modern Haskell ecosystem — Don Stewart and Brian O’Sullivan.
January 14th, 2012 at 12:22 am
And of course Simon Marlow, the other author of ghc.
And Philip Wadler and Richard Bird who created a multitude of Haskell pearls and did a lot of terrific theoretical work.
January 22nd, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Also, a special call out to the ‘Racket’ and ‘Clean’ functional languages and the authors behind them.
http://racket-lang.org/
http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean