Hi all.
A fresh copy of _Famous Reporter 26_ dropped through my letter box this
morning (thanks to Ralph Wessman). It has a couple of paragraphs of my
occasional gobshitings to this list on page 9, with "COMMENT" emblazoned
across the top like I was an actual commentator on something, but the other
219 pages I'm pleased to say are much better.
I am trying to learn a functional programming language; Haskell seems like a
good candidate. I hope that the disciple of doing so will help me to rid my
poetry of all the imperatives that have been littering it recently. For those
unfamiliar with the difference between functional and imperative programming
languages, the former tend to have what is called a "declarative" syntax and
consist of definitions of functions, whilst the latter tend to be involve
sequences of instructions telling the computer (or more precisely its avatar,
the compiler / interpreter) what to do. Programs written in imperative
languages are executed; programs written in functional languages are
evaluated.
The other thing about Haskell is that it's "strongly typed", which weakly
rephrased means that you have to be very exact about your ontology. Again,
I'm hoping this will prove to be good practice.
Dominic
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