Just do it

[Aziz]

I have a question: what are the actual uses of a functional language. Such as real-world examples, and even not-so-real-world examples. Perhaps look at this as a simple "why functional?" question.

[wtd]

Real world examples, eh? Well, just to list a few...

Microsoft's F# project, which is a dialect of O'Caml designed to work with the .NET platform. Also from Microsoft, C# 3.0 incorporates several aspects of functional programming languages (or at least most commonly found in functional programming languages).

Erlang is probably the most widely commercially used functional programming language.

[Clayton]

Is functional programming used more for applications? Is it possible to create graphics and such using functional programming languages? Or am I just deluded and need to go back to school

NOTE: Nice, a forum just for Functional Programming, who decided on that?

[rdrake]

Freakman wrote:

Is functional programming used more for applications? Is it possible to create graphics and such using functional programming languages? Or am I just deluded and need to go back to school

Dig a little deeper, or just click here.

[Tony]

Freakman wrote:

NOTE: Nice, a forum just for Functional Programming, who decided on that?

Myself (as announced on the blog, with Dan's nod of approval of course.

The rule of thumb is to just keep on creating threads in [GD] until a topic becomes popular enough to be moved to a dedicated forum. At 47 topics / 271 posts it's actually larger than some of the already existing areas.

[Lazy]

Hi all,

I'm a hobbyist programmer who recently dug in two functional programming languages, Scheme and Haskell. It was not an easy start, but as I'm beginning to grasp these languages, I'm more and more certain it was worth it.

So, why functional languages?

Well designed functional languages, such as Haskell or Scheme, really provide nothing more than what all high-level languages should: powerful abstraction mechanisms in a safe environment, so complex programs are simple to write and easy to maintain. The underlying mathematical model provides robustness and elegance, while the interpreter takes care of optimization and memory management.

Historically, FLs were used a lot in academic research, such as expert systems, planning, language comprehension etc. The famous robot simulation, SHRDLU, was written in LISP. The famous modern example includes Perl 6, which is being written in Haskell. Basically, any complex project can benefit from a functional approach.

And, which language to choose?

I picked Haskell and Scheme because they are well documented - and also because they are complementary to each other, so learning them both at once gives me a good picture of the underlying paradigm. The classic programming textbook, SICP uses Scheme for examples and exercises throughout, so it's worth knowing Scheme just to read to book (and the book's well worth reading.)

Anyway, I hope this helps... and wasn't too long for the first post.

Best, L.

[Tony]

it was a rather good post

why don't you also introduce yourself in our Hello World thread. I'm rather interested in your current location (we are mostly from Canada here, so it's exciting to learn about the other parts of the world)