Channel 9 - Functional Programming Fundamentals

Over the past two years, you've learned a fair amount about the functional programming paradigm's foray into general purpose imperative progamming languages (LINQ, Lambda's, etc in C# and VB.NET). And, of course, the newest language to join the Visual Studio family of languages, F#, is a functional language. You've heard us say how important functional language constructs are to the our current languages' capabilities to evolve in the right direction to meet the needs of the many-core future (the need for reliable and comprehensible concurrency, parallelism, etc) and, most importantly, to help vault computer programming into an age of compositionality (remember our talks on 9 regarding composability and evolution of software engineering as an engineering discipline?). Well, we decided to take a step back and teach you the fundamentals of functional programming at a level equivalent to any university. We even have a text book and professor who will expand our minds.
Dr. Erik Meijer will teach us Functional Programming Fundamentals using Haskell as the language for understanding the basic functional principles (in fact, the specific language isn't all that important, but Haskell is a pure functional language so it is entirely appropriate for learning the essential ingredients of functional programming. It is also a relatively small language and should be easy for you to get up to speed with Haskell once you understand the Why, What and How that underlies all functional languages…).