A couple of days ago, Chris Yocum asked me to help him out with some OCaml code. He's learning OCaml at the moment, and thought he'd practice it by solving a problem he'd encountered in his research on early Irish law ( Read more... )

Here's something that occurred to me the other day: consider ( duck-typed languages like Python )

About a month ago, wormwood_pearl and I went to see the fantastic stand-up comedian Daniel Kitson (who you should all go and see if the slightest opportunity presents itself). One thing that he said really struck me:If you ever think you've had an original thought, put it in quotation marks and type it into Google. Now that's a humbling experience.
So I really ( Read more... )

Sadly, Doug Bagley's Functional Programming Koans seem to have disappeared from the web. Googling will get you some, but not all. But here's my response to some of them anyway.

[If you're unaware of the connection between hackerdom and Zen Buddhism, you should probably go and read the AI koans, and then the Unix koans of Master Foo, though they're ( Read more... )