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Coders at Work: Reflections on the craft of programmingArthur Norman was a brilliant and slightly eccentric lecturer in the department. Wonderful guy, interested in symbolic algebra so he was big into Lisp as well. He gave a short course on functional programming in which he showed us how to build doubly linked lists without using any side effects at all. I vividly remember this because this was my first notion that you could do something that weirdБЂ”youБЂ™d think if you build a doubly-linked list you have to allocate the cells and then you have to fill them in to make them point to each other. It looks as if you just have to use side effects somehow. But he showed how, in a purely functional language, you could actually write it without using any side effects. So that opened my eyes to the fact that functional programming, which at that stage I knew very little about, was a medium you could really write quite interesting programs in rather than just little toy ones. Seibel: I think a lot of people might look at that demonstration and say, БЂњOh, isnБЂ™t that interesting,БЂ«and then still go back to hacking BCPL ...» |
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