If you’re one of the approx 3 people left in the world who:
- knows about functional programming
- has not yet seen Simon Peyton Jones‘ “A Taste of Haskell” talks from OSCON 2007
I suggest you get over there. It’s quite long, and it gets a bit difficult to follow without slides around 30 minutes into part 2, but it’s well worth watching. SPJ is an entertaining presenter, partly at least because he seems to be a bit of a stereotypical university lecturer type: very enthusiastic, clearly a towering intellect in the FP world, but on the other hand seems to bumble his way through the business of actually using computers!
If he’d been my lecturer back in the day, perhaps I’d have appreciated functional programming a bit more (“To do that, you’d have to solve the halting problem… so… it’s tricky.”).
The link of SPJ talk is broken, you can find video here