Wizards of Smart

I presented this at Houston Tech Fest 2009 back in September.

For those interested in learning the principles of functional programming, Dr. Erik Meijer and Channel 9 started releasing a lecture series using Haskell as the primary language and exercises in C#. They provide a discount for Graham Hutton‘s Programming in Haskell, the text for the series, as well. Go check it out here!

I’m quite interested in Matthew Podwysocki’s application of F# (and functional programming) to collective intelligence. Have any of you worked in the collective intelligence space? If so, with what languages, and what was your experience?

For those interested, I found this article and related tutorial from Eric White to be quite fascinating. I went through the tutorial this weekend and thought some of you might also be interested. Eric gives reasons for using functional programming (fp) over conventional object-oriented programming (oop); his most common reason is for performing transformations of data from one sort to another. Other highlights are more in-depth looks at extension methods, Linq and Office Open XML. (While you might wonder why you’d use fp instead of XSLT, the concepts can also apply to transforming objects/collections to other objects/collections using lazy evaluation and deferred execution).