Even though lot of people use Python in an object oriented style, it has several functions that enable functional programming. For those of you who don’t know, functional programming is a programming paradigm based on lambda calculus that treats computation as an evaluation of mathematical functions. Some of prominent functional programming languages include Scala, Haskell, Clojure, and so on. You should go through this nice article on functional programming that explains it in layman’s terms. Coming back to the topic at hand, Python provides features like lambda, filter, map, and reduce that can basically cover most of what you would need to operate on data. Let’s go ahead and play with them to understand their awesomeness, shall we? Continue reading “Understanding Filter, Map, And Reduce In Python”
Tag: Functional Programming
A Beginner’s Look At Lambda Calculus
Back in school, you must remember studying differential and integral calculus. Now what on earth is lambda calculus? Well, lambda calculus is basically a simple notation for functions and applications in mathematics and computer science. It has a significant impact in the field of programming language theory. It forms the basis for all the modern functional programming languages like Haskell, Scala, Erlang, etc. The main idea here is to apply a function to an argument and forming functions by abstraction. The good thing about lambda calculus is that the syntax is quite sparse, which makes it an elegant notation for representing functions. Here, we get a well-formed theory of functions as rules of computation. We will discuss this further soon. Even though the syntax of lambda calculus is sparse, it is really flexible and expressive. This feature makes is particularly useful in the field of mathematical logic. So what exactly is lambda calculus? How do we understand it? Continue reading “A Beginner’s Look At Lambda Calculus”
Perpetual Enigma 