Month: September 2022

Lambda Headache for Mere Mortals

A few years ago I attended a talk at a Lambda World Conference about Lambda Calculus. Although not an eye-opener (in fact that level of abstraction is rarely needed, nor advisable, in everyday programming), it was thought-provoking. By wisely crafting mathematical functions you could describe algorithms, fully equivalent to the good old recipe-like imperative programming code.

The point is that those lambda functions are really twisted.

Reading some anecdotes about Alonzo Church it is immediately clear he was quite a guy. And devising lambda calculus required quite a mind.

Since lambda calculus is just functions, no statement, it came to my mind I could use it to devise a solution to my “if-less” programming quiz.

The solution I prepared was too complex to be explained in my previous post, so I decided to write this post.

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Nothing lasts forever, but Cobol, Fortran, and C++

If you have kept up to date with the latest developments of C++, for sure you have noticed how convoluted and byzantine constructs and semantics have become.

The original idea of a C with Classes at the root of language is long lost and the fabled smaller and cleaner language hidden inside C++ is ever more difficult to spot and use.

The combo – backward-compatibility latch and committee-driven approval/refusal of proposals, make the language evolution spin around. Missing or late additions to the language are sitting ducks, and the lack of networking in the standard library, for a language that is 40, is enough to tell how poorly the evolution of the language is handled.

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