Just another lambdabananacamel,

Derren Brown recently claimed he would predict the UK lottery numbers, live on television, and then explain how he did it. It's doubtful that he did either — the alternative explanation that he'd actually committed a massive and improbably daring fraud is vastly more likely than the bullshit he spun out, as it's actually [...]

Here's a question that came up while I've been trying to implement currying in Perl: is Currying monadic? I've tried a couple of times, but not managed to explain what I mean very well on #haskell, so let's see if a longer writeup explains it better. My simplistic understanding of monads is that they take various things that are [...]

"Currying" is a simple idea that is surprisingly powerful on the one hand, and which was surprisingly hard (at least for me) to get my head around - possibly because the concept didn't exist natively in the languages I learnt first. When you declare a function in currying style, each argument is taken one at a time, returning a new, [...]

The nice chaps at NorthWestEngland PerlMongers have organized a technical meeting on 5th May, at the Manchester Digital Development Agency. I'll be doing a 3rd version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk, about Haskell-inspired craziness in Pure Perl. And Matt Trout and Ian Norton will be talking about OO Database design, and Maildir migration, so there's [...]

(This isn't a full blog post, but a note of a few things about implementing game grids in Haskell). A [[Cell]] structure seems to make sense for a lot of boards. In fact, even the problems I'm looking at might be approached simply indexing into row then col each time you want to access a [...]

This week's simple longest path exercise seems to have had more mileage in it than I expected. Thanks to everyone's comments and suggestions, I've updated with a number of times with, among other things, an improved Haskell version that acts on path elements instead of just characters. But I had intended to do a version [...]

Here's a simple problem, with solutions in Perl and Haskell. @joel: suppose I have a list of strings (they happen to be paths) - how might I find only the longest instance of each path? @joel: that is give /foo /foo/bar /foo/bar/baz /qux I only want back [...]

Every year or so I come back to the problem of writing a crossword puzzle compiler/player. I think Javascript would be the most promising for a web-based player, though I've given it a go in Java and Perl too. Modeling the problem is interesting in an Object Oriented language - I would find myself getting bogged down with [...]

On Saturday I gave an updated version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk. This time around I cut the whistlestop tour of builtin FP techniques in Perl (map/grep/join) and added a section on Monads - what they are and how to implement them. I'd originally worried that the slides might have been over-academic and [...]

Will on #geekup has been working on a Countdown letters and numbers game solver written in Python. I thought it'd be fun to try to do it in Haskell, and started with the letters game (anagram) solver. Starting with a string of jumbled letters, the goal is to make the longest possible anagram. I remember the first time [...]