ACCU Conference 2008, Day 4
First session today was called “Is FP for me” and covered the areas in which functional programming might be useful. The session was given by Hubert Matthews and gave an excellent overview of when and where to use a functional programming language. He started by discussing the different types of language, using as examples Fortran (for mathematical calculation), COBOL (for business applications) and Lisp (for more algorithmic and abstract programming). Although all three languages were created in the 1950s, they are still with us today, COBOL having inspired the creation of imperative languages such as C/C++ and Smalltalk, Lisp providing ideas which have developed into Haskell, OCaml and similar. When asked which language would give a neophyte a good introduction into the techniques, Hubert suggested Haskell.
Second session, from Didier Verna, was on Lisp programming and was an interesting look at the state of the art for Lisp in today’s world. Didier is passionate about Lisp and energetically set us straight on some of the wrong impressions we might have had about Lisp, such as performance, strong/weak typing, the object system (CLOS) and optimisation. I first played around with Lisp many years ago and there have been a lot of improvements since then. I’m tempted…
I missed out on the final sessions as I had to run off to catch a train.
It’s been a very interesting conference and I took the opportunity to try and attend all the sessions on functional programming and see if I could figure out what it meant and what it was useful for. I can’t think of any projects that I could use it on at the moment, but some of the ideas I’ve heard are very useful in any programming toolkit, such as ‘no side effects’ in functions. As I mentioned in an earlier piece, the specialised tracks at ACCU are often on subjects that we can consider ‘emerging technologies’, in that they are not mainstream but where there is a growing interest in them. When there is strong interest in the tracks, as there were in this years ACCU, then it’s a pretty good indication that this is a technology that is set to become more mainstream in the next years. Keep an eye on Functional Programming.