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Scheming on a Thing

May 9, 2007 · by Scott Fradkin

I’ve decided that I really need to be more multilingual. Not in the sense that I should speak another verbal language, though that would be a really great idea, but in the programming language sense.

All of the languages that I’ve learned in the past are standard procedural, object-oriented languages. There is a whole other realm of languages which I hadn’t really taken a look at before, functional programming languages. That’s one of the things that really stands out about Ruby. Ruby has a wide range of uses, but the most noticeable thing about it is that even though you can use it as an object-oriented language, it contains a lot of functional programming paradigms.

Functional programming is a bit strange to wrap your head around if you’ve never really used it before. The entire structure is based upon Lambda Calculus which seems to be nearly impossible to understand unless you’ve got a degree in mathematics. Lambda Calculus basically says that you can represent everything as a function that takes one argument and that argument can be another function. There are ways to represent the natural numbers, standard arithmetic, and even logic functions via Lambda Calculus. It’s pretty heady material to read.

I got curious and started taking a look at Scheme. Scheme is a derivative of Lisp, which makes it one of the “parentheses” languages. Lots and lots of them. It’s no worse than having curly braces everywhere, really. Functions are first class objects. It uses stack notation to perform arithmetic, so there is no operator precedence. It’s a really interesting language. I haven’t really used it for anything yet. I’m still looking through the language specs trying to figure out everything it can do. I’m sure I’ll have more things to say about it in the future. Until then, I’m just going to have some fun with it.

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Comments

#1 - Kevin Runde said on May 10, 2007:
Schema is a fun language. Tail recursion is awesome. You can have an infinite recursive function call that will never die!!! Plus being able to talk about data structures and say you need to do the car of the cdr of the car of the car of the cdr is just fun too. Keeps updated on how it goes.

-Kevin
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