Programming articles

post on E-lang I think comprehensive OO (occasional OO is fine) is a very poor metaphor for the world, a poor tool for problem solving, and an unnatural way to think.

Email on OOP C/C++ folks see OO as a liberation from a world that has nothing resembling a first-class functions, while Lisp folks see OO as a prison since it limits their use of functions/objects

Functional programming (FP)

Slava Akhmechet

Functional Programming For The Rest of Us

bhurt-aw

The Functional-Relational Impedance Match

Lazy lists are dramatically better than objects for interacting with relational databases.

By concentrating on the row level and demoting the relation level to second class citizens, [OOP] totally misses the power and point of relational calculus.

Martin Fowler

Closure

Closures in Ruby for the imperative programmer.

Christopher Diggins

Typing like a Functional Programmer

Currying

MarkCC

Why Haskell?

Like Lisp and Smalltalk, it shows you a new way to think about programming.

Paul's Pontifications

"No Silver Bullet" and Functional Programming

The author believes functional programming really is a "silver bullet".

Languages

Joel Spolsky

The Perils of JavaSchools

I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java...

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David Chisnall

What Programming Languages Should You Know?

C (low level), Smalltalk (OOP), Lisp (macros), Erlang (concurrency), Haskell (pure FP), and Prolog (logic)

Eventually, someone might create a programming language that is the ideal choice for all uses. (Lisp programmers will argue that this has already happened.)

Also, someone on Reddit suggested Forth (stacks).

Paul Graham

Revenge of the Nerds

We want to write a function that generates accumulators... In...Fortran, C, C++, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not clear whether you can actually solve this problem.

Steele & Sussman

The Lambda Papers

Mike Vanier

Scalable computer programming languages

a review of popular languages for use in large projects, written in 2001, with updates in 2003 and 2006

... the presence of pointers and the absence of [garbage collection] ... makes C++ non-scalable ... 2003: Even though C++ is monstrously complex, the ability to write code that moves smoothly from a bit-level of abstraction to a fairly high level of abstraction is extremely valuable for many projects ...
The abstraction level of both C# and Java is mediocre; ... not nearly as good as languages that support both object-oriented and functional programming (such as Lisp and Ocaml).

Eiffel is quite a scalable language, certainly more so than C++, Java, or C#. I personally find the lack of support for functional programming quite stifling, but I'd rather program in Eiffel than in Java, C++, or C# any day.

Python ... [is] a great language for writing small programs, but when the program source code is longer than about a thousand lines I start wishing I had a type checker.

Perl is incredibly non-scalable; I dare you to try to understand any Perl program of more than a hundred lines or so.

Lisp is, quite simply, a brilliant computer language. ... it's not easy to get the kind of absolute type safety in a Lisp program that you'd get in (say) an Ocaml program. Still, I really like Lisp and I think that every serious programmer needs to learn it.
Unfortunately, Dylan hasn't yet caught on ... Dylan has the potential to be a very scalable language.

Ocaml has almost all of the typical features that I've identified as giving a computer language more scalability ... It's also incredibly efficient for such a sophisticated language ... Ocaml is by far my favorite computer language ... Ocaml is a long way from perfect.... On the other hand, none of these problems are show-stoppers, and I predict that Ocaml is going to become a major force in the world of programming languages ... 2003: While I still think Ocaml is an outstanding language in many respects, there are significant things I don't like about it. ... The object system doesn't support multimethods ... 2006: I still think Ocaml is a great language, by the way.
... if you only want to learn one programming language out of all the ones I mentioned, please do yourself a favor and learn Ocaml. It's not perfect, but it's the best language I've ever used. If you have the time to learn two languages, the other language should be Common Lisp or Scheme.
2006: I think Haskell has the potential to be the most scalable language ever, but the learning curve is monstrous. ... [Haskell's] purely-functional nature allows you to combine components arbitrarily, and they always work the way you expect! ... However, ... dealing with I/O and mutable state requires more work than in most languages ...

Design Patterns

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Peter Norvig

Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming

An online slide presentation of buiding design patterns into dynamic languages.

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Greg Sullivan

Advanced Programming Language Features for Executable Design Patterns (Click "The GOF Design Patterns in a Dynamic OO Language" in the Projects section.)

Language features such as reflection, higher-order functions, multiple dispatch, and predicate types have a positive impact on the implementation of nearly all of the Gang of Four Design Patterns. In some cases, the need for an explicit pattern nearly disappear; ... Other patterns become much simpler; ... Other patterns, ... are a universal programming concept, but could be supported by more sophisticated type systems.

Miscellaneous

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Peter Norvig

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

"the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Even in programming, patience is a virtue.

Donald Knuth

Literate Programming (pdf)

Note that more comments does not mean more readable code.

ririan project

5 Reasons To Take Naps

Too Much Code

End of software's dark age?

... the messaging model in Erlang prevents many types of timing problems. Functional languages may eliminate the many types of bugs which arise from side effects. The essence of a design should not be concerned with timing or unexpected side effects, so whenever possible this should be solved in the language itself. ... Code in object-oriented languages often includes many unessential objects that are just noise from a high-level view.

Technical

Ray Djajadinata

Y Combinator for Dysfunctional Non-Schemers

Very nice introduction to the Y combinator, using examples in JavaScript.

... I come across these mental landmines like "pass the function as the first argument to itself", and my brain will just explode ...

Actually, it's not the whole function. It's just a reference to the function.

Guy Steele & Gerald Sussman

The Lambda Papers

The original "Lambda: The Ultimate" articles discussing efficiency issues in implementing programming languages.

Jonathan Bartlett

Lazy programming and lazy evaluation

Sometimes by delaying an evaluation until just before the value is needed, you can either optimize the speed of a program or restructure a program into a more intelligible form.

D. A. Turner

Total Functional Programming (pdf)

The author proposes a super-pure functional language that's not even Turing complete, but the only programs that can't be written in it are ones that don't terminate. A special type called "codata" is required for programs that aren't supposed to terminate.

The existing model of functional programming ... is compromised ... by the presence of partial functions. We consider a simple discipline of total functional programming designed to exclude the possibility of non-termination. Among other things this requires a type distinction between data, which is finite, and codata, which is potentially infinite.