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Title: Functional Programming Makes A Comeback
Proposer: Chuck Allison
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 45 mins
Description:
Functional and imperative programming had their start at about the same time: 1936! The Turing machine led to imperative programming and Church's lambda calculus to functional programming. These paradigms found their first, high-level outlets in FORTRAN and Lisp, respectively. The twain are now meeting in today's popular programming languages. This tutorial illustrates the power of functional programming, including referential transparency, higher-order functions, anonymous functions (aka lambdas), currying, lazy evaluation, and infinite lists (aka streams) in C++, Python, and D. Examples in ML will be shown upon request .