Is it possible to express a "recursive" function like factorial without using recursion or iteration? The answer--often surprising--is yes. The technique involved--expressing recursive functions as fixed-points--leads to a more fundamental understanding of recursion.

Wow, there's a lovely world that needs to be explored

Disco is an open-source implementation of the Map-Reduce framework for distributed computing. As the original framework, Disco supports parallel computations over large data sets on unreliable cluster of computers.

The Disco core is written in Erlang, a functional language that is designed for building robust fault-tolerant distributed applications. Users of Disco typically write jobs in Python, which makes it possible to express even complex algorithms or data processing tasks often only in tens of lines of code. This means that you can quickly write scripts to process massive amounts of data.

Disco was started at Nokia Research Center as a lightweight framework for rapid scripting of distributed data processing tasks. This far Disco has been succesfully used, for instance, in parsing and reformatting data, data clustering, probabilistic modelling, data mining, full-text indexing, and log analysis with hundreds of gigabytes of real-world data.

Erlang + Python = complete beautifulness

[…] the recorded sessions from last year’s Commercial Users of Functional Programming are now up in conveniently viewable form on Google Video.

Erlang, F#, ...

Over the last weekend I wanted to have a go at porting Oliver Steele's string lambda into Erlang. And here is the result ..

functional programming beauty

In Haskell we essentially use recursion, this mean defining a function using itself definition.

more magic!