master functional programming languages

Now all I need is to learn (more) programming languages.

To be zen: what does it mean to master something anyway?

But I’m not one to piegon hole people or programming languages.

A couple of weeks back I mentioned this book that I wanted to get:

Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs (Mark Jason Dominus)

A friend got their copy first and kindly loaned it to me (mine arrives Friday). The first 3 chapters covering recursion, dispatch tables and memoization respectively are kind of alright. Not particularly interesting to me because I’ve used these techniques in the part.

Chapter 4 is where it starts to get interesting for me.
This simple example has made me think about Perl a little differently:

sub upto {

my ($m, $n) = @_;

return sub { 
 $m <= $n ? $m++ : undef; 
};

}

I’m a quarter of the way through chapter 4. MJD’s solution to permutation makes the normal interviewing solution to that question seem ugly in comparison [Here’s a hint: it uses iterators! Read the book for the solution]