Came across an amazingly interesting series of lectures on Functional Programming on Channel 9. In the 13 part C9 Lectures: Functional Programming Fundamentals, Dr. Erik Meijer, one of the most colorful Microsoft employees, takes us into the fascinating and somewhat alien world of Haskell.

I will discuss my thoughts on each episode as I follow along. Doing some Haskell gets me well outside of my comfort zone, so I might even have something worth reading to say about if :)

The first episode takes a short history tour through the origins of functional programming, talking about languages like ML, Miranda, Cecil and other obscurities. He kind of lost me when he rushed through SKI Combinators, but the gallery of languages and what influence on modern languages they had was pretty cool.

My eyes glazed over a little when I saw the Quicksort in Haskell, the same way they did at about page 6 of Knuth... I hope things will make more sense after seeing the next lecture... That, or I really should stick to LOB applications :P

In this excellent four-partShunting Yard Algorithm in C#, TDD Style videos, Brett goes through quite a few red-green-refactor cycles in implementing this alogrithm to transform an expression into the Polsih notation.

If you've never done TDD, this is great demo of its value. If you've done TDD, it might be less interesting but informative nonetheless!

Because I'm going through a MS Partner Academy training called 'Developing .NET Applications With Visual Studio 2010 for Technical Pre-Sales Professionals', I come across a lot of stuff I hadn't really looked at before.

One of those is F#. I made a blogpost about it working with WPF quite a while back, but never really dove into it.

So, yesterday I saw this amazing webcast by Luca Bolognese called An Introduction to Microsoft F#. Even though Luca has 'an outrageuous accent' the talk is quite informative and pretty funny. It also gives a nice overview of F# and how/why it's used.

This is another old video I can across while sifting through the Channel 9 Video Archives.

How do you program when you're blind? This video show how Kenneth Spector, who was a 2004 Microsoft intern does his work, using a braillemonitor and a screenreader. Pretty cool!

Shortly after listening to the Ivar Jacobson podcast, my playlist presented me with episode 149 of the SE-Radio podcast: "Difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science with Chuck Connell".

The talk is focussed on how engineering is a much softer discipline than computer science since people are involved. This is way real-world projects are inherently less predictable than typical CS problems, which are usually of a more algorithmical nature.

Chuck Connell actually comes to the same conclusion as Jacobson, which is that we need to form a body of best practices that can become a baseline for the craft that is software engineering. This is the only way we -as a discipline- can improve. Learn from our mistakes, document them and avoid them, just as people building bridges have done throughout the ages!