Functional Languages are driving a broader set of choices for programmers. O'Reilly editors Mike Loukides and Mike Hendrickson sat down recently to talk about the advantages of functional programming languages and how functional language techniques can be deployed with almost any language. (The full conversation is embedded below.)

Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have long recommend learning a new language each year, especially those languages that teach new concepts [discussed at the 02:02 mark]. Functional languages have made that easier. They behave in a different way than the languages many of us grew up on — procedural like C or languages derived from C. Plus, the polyglot programming movement has driven the interest in functional languages as one of the languages you might want to learn.

Programmers need to understanding the advantages of using a functional language, such as productivity, power of expressiveness, reliability, stateful objects, concurrency, natural concurrency, modularity, and composability [05:37]. Though a search still exists for a magic bullet [06:29] to make it easier for programers to better solve the problem of concurrency. CPU speeds have been stuck at roughly the same level for the last four to five years. Programmers have been given is more transistors on a chip, hence more CPUs and more cores to work with making concurrency one of the most difficult issues facing computer scientists today. Enter functional programming with improved debugging and the ability to write more reliable code in a concurrent environment.

Additional highlights from this conversation include:

Print book sales of functional languages are growing, especially books on R programming. And while Loukides doesn't consider R to be a functional language, some debate exists about its classification. Though it's clear the data science movement has driven the use of R because it's well designed for statistics and dealing with data. [Discussed at the 00:29 mark]

We'll see F# grow in the Microsoft development environment while Scala and Clojure are dominating the open source space. Erlang will also be around for a long time for building highly reliable concurrent systems. [Discussed at the 03:01 mark]

Since the publication of Doug Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts, coders have discovered the functional language abilities of JavaScript and Java. Google's release of Maps and Gmail revolutionized how JavaScript is used. Some of today's best examples include Node for high-performance websites and D3 for creating exotic and beautiful data visualizations. [Discussed at the 08:15 mark]

While JavaScript isn't a functional language, it's designed loosely, so it's easy to use as a functional language. You might also be interested in how functional programming techniques can be used in C++ — a blog post written by John Carmack. [Discussed at the 10:36 mark]

Java isn't intended as a functional language. Though Dean Wampler's Functional Programming for Java Developers provides an approachable introduction to functional programming for anyone using an object-oriented language. [Discussed at the 11:41 mark]

The use of a functional language or functional language techniques can make your code more robust and easier to debug. [Discussed at the 12:09 mark]

You can view the entire conversation in the following video:

Tune in next month for a discussion of NoSQL and web databases.

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Last night Mike Dewar presented a wonderful talk to the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup titled, “First steps in data visualisation using d3.js.” Mike took the audience through an excellent review of d3.js fundamentals, as well as showed off some of the features of working with Chrome Web Developer Tools. This is one of the best talks we have ever had, and if you have had any interest in exploring d3.js, but were intimidated by the design concepts or syntax, this is exactly the talk for you.

Also, Mike’s slides were all designed using d3.js and are available for download on his Github account: https://github.com/mikedewar/d3talk.

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Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

Comments

if (typeof console == "undefined" || typeof console.log == "undefined") var console = { log: function() {} };

One of the neatest features in the discontinued-but-alive Google Wave was its collection of gadgets and extensions. Many of those gadgets live on in Google's new Shared Spaces, where you can invite others to contribute, vote, and collaborate on the web. More »

Real-time feed parsing company Superfeedr just increased it’s range of technology support which significantly increases the ease that developers can integrate with them. Developers can now connect to Superfeedr using only JavaScript. They appear to have covered all bases with this release by providing support for HTTP Streaming and WebSocket connections for real-time streams. Superfeedr aren’t alone in offering real-time client push but they may well be the first to offer it as an extension of an existing service.

Superfeedr have been building a complex feed fetching and parsing infrastructure for quite some time now. This generally involves subscribing to, and redistributing, RSS feeds (although they’ve also just introduced support for “arbirary content”). This type of functionality has frequently been associated with, and restricted to, server technologies but Superfeedr have just changed that by adding real-time client push technology support so users can now more easily subscribe to feeds from thin clients such as web browsers.

Julien commented on the new server to client focus:

Superfeedr will release more products in this direction, with a greater
focus on Server to client, rather than Server to Server. Even though
having realtime server-to-server communications is required for a lot of
services and apps who publish to other 3rd party apps, or consume from
them, it’s also obvious that having smarter clients who can display
realtime updates without any user interaction (like a refresh) is
becoming a necessity.

Superfeedr are very active at introducing new features based on customer feedback. It’s just one of the reasons why they were recently listed as one of the top 10 RSS and syndication technologies of 2010 by Read Write Web. This relatively recent move to provide real-time client push has again been customer driven.

Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr announced the new functionality on the Superfeedr blog as two separate features – WebSockets and Comet – because it’s now possible to make subscriptions using two additional methods. However, it’s very possible that somebody will write a JavaScript library that hides away the underlying transfer protocol to choose the best connection method for the client runtime; the web browser. The reason this is likely to happen is that WebSocket support is still relatively low in browsers, the specification is still in its infancy and developers just want their real-time client push functionality to work no matter the web browser. WebSocket support has recently been disable in Firefox 4 and Opera due to a security vulnerability adding weight to this argument.

Julien provided his take on WebSockets:

The whole websocket adoption is a chicken and egg problem. Now that some browsers implement it, we need more apps to support it, so that the spec can evolve, become stabler (and more secure) to reach the next iteration and full support by all major browsers.

What this latest real-time client push move actually means for developers is that they don’t have to write any server-side code to integrate with Superfeedr and they can add real-time client push functionality to their applications without the need for any complex infrastructure such as real-time servers.

As far as I’m aware Superfeedr are first company to add real-time client push functionality to their service without it being their core focus. Is this trend set to continue and what will the demand for it be like?

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Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Superfeedr API Profile, 1 mashup

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