Computers:

• Type is declared by a class statement, enum statement, inseparably in a function (instance construction) expression, or the identifier associated with the aforementioned declarations (when not anonymous).
  
• Instance construction is declared by a class or enum constructor call expression, a function expression, or literal class expression-- all of which return an instance reference.
  
• Expression constructs an instance or operates on instance reference(s), and returns an instance reference or void.
  
• Functional programming is a function call expression, that may optionally nest (a hierarchy of) function call expression. A referentially transparent (aka pure) function is re-entrant, stateless, partial evaluation agnostic, and thus composable (aka reusable).
  
• Imperative (aka stateful, or state-machine) programming is an ordered sequence of expres​sion(s). Each imperative sequence (in a nested hierarchy of them) is an identifier namespace (aka scope)-- a means to granularize the referential opacity. A statement is a grammatical unit which forms an expression that returns a type of void.
  

Code:

raise First + raise Second handle First => 1 | Second => 2,

what is the value of this expression? It clearly depends on the order
of evaluation.

"If you really wanted to turn off the global internet, you'd have to seek out people on every continent and every country," said Cowie from Renesys. "The internet is so decentralized that there is no kill switch."

"No you can't do that," said Harvard's Faris. "The internet is designed to be robust. Certain links break and then other links are opened."

In Egypt, for example, people who couldn't access the broadband internet were able to place international phone calls to Europe to log on to dial-up internet service, he said, which, of course, operates on phone lines.

Google even announced a service that would let people in Egypt use landline telephones to post to Twitter using voice messages.

"Communication continues and people revert to other modes,"

Shelby wrote:The currency has to be created. If it does not represent an exchange between tangible money, then it means who ever created it, is like a central bank, stealing that value and causing inflation as it spends it into the the ecosystem.

So in essence what Facebook has done is admit that their business model is an economic failure:

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

Now they will take down all the game developers with them, because their system could not sustain economic viability with a free market of game developers charging how they wished.

One thing is a virtual currency is a way for people in the developing world to earn income on Facebook and avoid the issues of money transfer and transactional costs. But the problem is that if Facebook doesn't back this currency with gold or silver, this it will just be stealing value via inflation and ripping off the entire ecosystem, eventually bringing the whole thing down.

The genesis of Facebook's demise will be decentralized social network. It is coming. The Napster or Gnutella version of Facebook is coming. I should know. Hint.

I can't until a year or 1.5 years from now and we do the search on indeed.com for both sets of jobs advertised

I think you'd be hard pressed to expose an average C# programmer to all of it in one place if not for SO. It'd take years of playing with it to come up with the same hard won list. – Allain Lalonde Sep 14 '08 at 18:54
7

I've been writing JavaScript professionally for 10 years now and I learned a thing or three from this thread. Thanks, Alan! – Andrew Hedges Sep 20 '08 at 7:39

@Vincent Robert: please note that arguments.callee is being deprecated. – ken Dec 29 '10 at 21:50

The complexity of functional programming is perhaps a bit easier to explain. It’s certainly possible to write nearly conventional code in Scala. Here, for example, is Scala code for a conventional way to sum the elements of a list of integers:

Code:

    def sum(l: List[int]): int = {
        var result: int = 0
        for (item <- l)
            result += item
        return result
    }

But that’s not “the Scala way”. A good Scala programmer is expected to use this instead:

Code:

    def sum(l: List[int]): int = (0/:l){_+_}

Isn’t that lovely? This code (that appears to be line noise) is probably the most classic example of a catamorphism (a data transform that results in less data out than in). Basically it says, initialize the result to 0, then go from beginning to end through l, and for each item compute the new result to be result+item. Oh wait, isn’t that exactly what our earlier code did? Well, um, yes, but… this way doesn’t use any of that evil nasty mutable state. This code might be darned near illegible to normal people, but it is the pinnacle of purity and virtue in the FP world.
Oh… if you’re one of those people who worries about efficiency, you do not want to know what that tiny little bit of code expands to.

Let me say that I like immutable data and immutable data structures. I wrote an article here about immutable data in Java. One of the things that attracted me to Scala was its full support for immutable data and immutable data structures. But dagnabbit, mutable variables within a method (or function) aren’t a crime and won’t hurt anything when they’re allocated on the stack as is done by the JVM. This mutable vs. immutable fight has been going on since Turing and Church. Pretty much 100% of all actual, working, useful programs have been written with mutable state. So FP programmers, just get over your aversion to it, okay?

Code:

(0/:l){_+_} !!!!

I’m not one to disparage a languages syntax for being too heavy on the symbols, but do you guy realize that looks like a smily version of goatse guy wearing a hat?

In 1975 I started using “structured programming” techniques in assembly language, and became a true believer.

In 1983 a new era dawned for me as I started doing some C programming on Unix and MS-DOS. For the next five years, I would be programming mixed C/assembly systems running on a variety of platforms including microcoded bit-slice graphics processors, PCs, 68K systems, and mainframes. For the five years after that, I programmed almost exclusively in C on Unix, MS-DOS, and Windows.

Another new era began in 1994 when I started doing object-oriented programming in C++ on Windows. I fell in love with OO, but C++ I wasn’t so sure about. Five years later I came across the Eiffel language, and my feelings for C++ quickly spiraled toward “contempt.”

The following year, 2000, I made the switch to Java and I’ve been working in Java ever since.

Coroutines are analogous to subroutines, but they are symmetrical with respect to caller and callee: When coroutine A invokes coroutine B, the action of A is temporarily suspended and the action of B resumes where B had most recently left o

Code:

function TwoDimensionWalk( m, n )
{
  for( i = 0; i <= m; ++i )
      for( j = 0; j <= n; ++i )
      {
        // do any thing here
        yield to Consume
      }
}

function Consume()
{
  // do any thing here
  yield to TwoDimensionWalk
}

Code:

function TwoDimensionWalk( m, n )
{
  for( i = 0; i <= m; ++i )
      for( j = 0; j <= n; ++i )
      {
        NextJ()
        Consume()
      }
}

function NextJ()
{
  // do any thing here
}

function Consume()
{
  // do any thing here
}

>I don’t think a “forgone license fee” counts as a loss under any accounting system.

Yeah, there’s no way the IRS would buy that. MS has been able to get massive write-offs by giving away copies of their products to schools and charities, but I don’t think NOK counts as a charity yet.

Jacob Hallén Says:
February 12th, 2011 at 11:12 am

With Symbian the customer is owned by the operator. For an app to work (without tons of tedious warnings) , it needs to have a certificate signed by the operator. In exceptional circumstances you can get your certificate signed by the phone manufacturer, but most of the time this doesn’t happen, because the phone manufacturer wants to stay buddies with the operator and get him to subsidise the manufacturers phones.
As an app developer you are stuck in certification hell. It is tedious and damned expensive.

Enter the IPhone. The customer is owned by Apple. They will lease the customer to you on fairly decent terms. You no longer need to deal with hundreds of operators or manufacturers that see you as a threat to their business. This is a large part of the success of Apple in the market. It beats the pants off the Symbian model, because users can get the apps they want with any operator they care to use and the developers have one target to develop for. However, Apple charges a high price for the convenience.

Google sees this and is also worried about being kept out of the walled garden with their ads. They put Android on the market, making it free and making the apps self certified. This casts the users free from the control of both operators and handset manufacturers. It makes the devlopers happy, because they are no longer under the control of Apple.

# Some Guy Says:
February 12th, 2011 at 12:27 pm

> Apple charges a high price for the convenience.

I wouldn’t call it a high price at all. 30% is quite typical for what we had to pay to distributors back in the days of software in boxes on retail shelves, and we don’t have to deal with the cost of implementing a payment system, etc.

# Morgan Greywolf Says:
February 12th, 2011 at 2:01 pm

I wouldn’t call it a high price at all. 30% is quite typical for what we had to pay to distributors back in the days of software in boxes on retail shelves, and we don’t have to deal with the cost of implementing a payment system, etc.

But we no longer live in a world of boxed software. These days most of us who do buy software do so online. That means the only middle men that are of any consequence are the credit card processors and the transaction clearinghouses. Why do we need Apple? Oh, I forgot, because they make us.

# tmoney Says:
February 12th, 2011 at 4:05 pm

>Why do we need Apple? Oh, I forgot, because they make us.

And the examples of independent Android developers making their millions without using Android market place are…

@Some Guy:

Certainly, there are examples of people getting rich off Apple’s app store, just like there are people getting rich from football, from singing, etc.

A lot of people make the assumption that paid apps are the way to go, because it’s easier to make good money with them than via advertising. That makes sense if the average developer can, in fact, make good money on the average app through Apple’s store.

I haven’t checked out this guy’s assumptions or math or numbers, but he goes into great detail, and concludes that the median paid app in Apple’s store earns $682 for its developer.