Remembering the Future

You don't need to be scared about this functional construction and transformation stuff just because "introductory" articles on the subject start talking about Haskell, monads, lambda calculus, etc. in about the second paragraph. With the help of our friendly local ex-professors and Haskell geeks Dr. Meijer and Dr. Lämmel, I have learned to stop worrying and love monad comprehensions; we believe thatVB9 / C# 3.0 and the LINQ technologies will help bring functional programming to the masses, whether or not they know that they are doing it. The first step is to understand the power of language integrated QUERY for working with data and the functional construction approach to reshaping it rather than modifying it in place, even though C# 3.0 and XLinq still support traditional imperative data manipulation for all sorts of pragmatic reasons. The critical next step is to understand that mixing the two styles in the same section of code is like begging to be haunted by the Halloween Problem.

Topics: LinQ | Programming