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Tools, tools, tools. And Lambda's

I like tools. I learning about them, learning to use them and simply discovering them.

So, my current topics of interest are an assortment of languages and a discipline. The discipline is "Functional programming" - that lead off to a couple of languages.

Lately, I have been learning Ruby. I like its pure "object-orientedness" and its conciseness and its ability to support functional programming - if you have the discipline. Lambda's intrigued me, but I felt that I wasn't getting the whole picture. Then I read about LINQ - a project based on my bread and butter language, C#. LINQ adds Language Integrated Query capabilities and set handling features, basically to C# itself. Well, how do they do this? OK, Lambda's. In C# 3.0. Well there's something I didn't know about, but I'm starting to see something important take shape.

From there I followed my nose and ended up looking at many neat things. I have tripped over a number of functional programming tools such as Haskell, OCaml and F#. Haskell looked good as presented in A Gentle Introduction to Haskell 98 - particularly since this tutorial gives a good feel for the functional programming model.

How'd I get to functional programming? I tripped over Lambdas in C# 3.0.

Of course, to whet one's whistle regarding functional programming see Introduction to Functional Programming, which is geared somewhat towards Python, but is not hampered by that. The examples are readily understandable and I could see them through to Ruby.

My head is spinning. It's great. Which way do I go? F# and a head first into FP. Oh wait, what about my continued explorations into Ruby and Rails? Oh, and then when do I get to C# 3.0....

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