Comments on: Programmers go bananas

By: ChristianS

ChristianS — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:32:35 +0000

Referential transparency is a nice property to have, but not needed for associativity of composition.

Unit, 1, or (), having a single element, is very different from void, which has none. Categorically, that makes the difference between a terminal and an initial object.

Monads are not type constructors like lists, they are a completely different kind of beasts. A monad is a concept for which lists happen to be an example.

By: Robert Emerson

Robert Emerson — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:57:13 +0000

Excellent article. I also started with SICP, which lead to Haskell. In order to understand important aspects of functional programming I have come to believe that I need to understand a bit of category theory. Your essay helps, thanks.

By: Digital Digressions » Blog Archive » Permutations of Iteration

Digital Digressions » Blog Archive » Permutations of Iteration — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:04:20 +0000

[...] This looks pretty much like the previous example. But here, instead of map, we have lift, which takes only one argument, a function, and returns a new function that applies that function to every element of a list. That new function is then applied (here, in a Scheme-like syntax) to the list argument. I learned about lift from this blog article. [...]

By: kerneltrap

kerneltrap — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 17:18:26 +0000

Thanks, great article!
I’m waiting for the continuuation…

By: Chris Rathman

Chris Rathman — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 03:08:38 +0000

Since you mention SICP, I thought my attempts at doing some translations of SICP to other languages (Alice ML, OCaml, Oz, and Haskell) might be of passing interest:

http://www.codepoetics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Topics:SICP_in_other_languages

Haven’t got real far just yet. More of a long term recreational project.

By: Santosh

Santosh — Fri, 26 May 2006 11:20:10 +0000

Thanks for a great article

By: physics musings » Blog Archive » Categorical spacetime

physics musings » Blog Archive » Categorical spacetime — Wed, 17 May 2006 21:28:20 +0000

[...] I’ve developed a lively interest in CT during my computer science wanderings , and even wrote an elementary introduction (geared towards programmers) that you may find useful (if you’re new to the field and don’t mind digressions into computer programming). [...]

By: muro

muro — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:18:44 +0000

Great, that’s how I understood it as well just wasn’t sure, maybe I was missing something. Thanks.

I’ll have a look at the tutorial, thanks.

By: jao

jao — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:24:40 +0000

muro,
Sorry, there was a typo in the anchor: the ‘further reading’ refers to the last section in the article itself, named, well, further reading

BTW, I liked Bird’s book a lot, but you won’t find much about monads in there. My preferred tutorial intro to monads is All about Monads (just in case you didn’t know it).

Thanks!

By: muro

muro — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:39:54 +0000

Nice article, thanks. I started with functional programming only a short time ago and by the time I finished the Introduction to functional programming using Haskell from Richard Bird, there was still a big void remaining on Monads. They were described in the book, I just didn’t get it yet. I hope it will come eventually.

Just a short note: The “further reading” link points to the admin site - wordpress login is required. Would you mind to share that section as well? I would like to pick up a good book on this and there might be some good pointers.

Thanks, muro