How I Design Programs

submited by
Style Pass
2021-07-17 20:00:10

Functional programming is full of “folk tricks” that seem inscrutable to novices. Many of them can be traced back to John Reynolds, who showed us how to use continuation-passing style and defunctionalization to transform a recursive interpreter for a language into an abstract machine for programs in that language. The same techniques explain zippers and accumulating parameters. Buried within all those applications there is usually a hidden appeal to the algebraic property of associativity. In this talk, I will entice associativity out of the shadows and into the limelight.

Jeremy Gibbons is a professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Algebra of Programming research group. His main research interest is in programming methodology - that is, in better languages for writing computer programs, and better ways of using the languages we already have. He is particularly concerned with functional languages and with ways of expressing and reasoning about recurring patterns in software structure. His book Algorithm Design with Haskell (with Richard Bird) just came out.

Leave a Comment