I am trying to heed the Pragmatic Programmer’s advice to learn a new language each year and this year I figured it would not be a bad idea to look at functional languages. There is a lot of buzz and blog posts about functional programming going on right now so there should be plenty of fresh material and this won’t be my first exposure to functional programming. I’ll have to dust off some of my notes from the programming languages class I took during some of my masters work.
I am planning to follow along with the Real World Haskell book club (which starts tomorrow night) and also mess around with F# so I thankfully won’t have to rely on my one semester of OCaml to help me get going. As a fan of sports and statistics I’ll probably try and use that as my problem domain while exploring these languages. I am really looking forward to trying to wrap my mind around functional programming as it is so different than thinking about objects and should be a great “neurobic” activity for the ol’ brain.