Microsfot Channel 9 Shows on Functional Programming Language

Last night I watched two new lectures on Functional Programming Fundamentals by Eric Mejier. I watched his discussion on Visual Studio 2010 Inversion of Enumerations before. That was very impressive. This series talks explore more fundamentals about Functional Language.

I watched DNRTV on F# before. My impression of this language is that it is back to old style of programming in structured functions. It is far away from objective oriented language such as C# and VB.Net. However, Eric talks demonstrate some unique powers of functional language. I really like its stateless and easy test features.

One question about functional language is how it is integrated with OOP languages such as C# and VB.NET? F# will be part of VS 2010. There must be ways easily to integrate it to C#. When I finish Eric's talks, I think I'll get much clear picture of FP's role.

One interesting point of Eric's talks is that he starts from popular FP language Haskell 98, instead of Microsoft's F#. The first talk is mainly on the history of FP and the second one jumps into Haskell. The tool or FP system shell he used for loading and running Haskell scripts is Hugs.