Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

When I was first learning Haskell, there were some imperative design patterns that I had trouble converting to functional style Haskell. Memoization is the first thing that comes to mind. I use memoization so much that it was pretty much trivial do in an imperative language like Java. However, I could not figure out how to do it in Haskell. In this blog post, I will discuss how you can memoize your functions in Haskell to boost performance in case you're ever in a situation where you want to use it. It turns out that memoization in Haskell is just as easy, if not easier, than memoization in an imperative language. Before I talk about memoization in Haskell, I will discuss the traditional approach to memoizing a recursive function in an imperative language. It essentially boils down to these steps: Query lookup table to see if result is computed; If so, return it Compute result recursively Store result in lookup table Return result For example, consider the numbers in Catal...

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the differences between functional languages (like Haskell) and imperative languages (like C or Java). While I made some good points in this post, I don't think I gave enough credit to Haskell. After learning more about Haskell, it has become my favorite programming language. In this blog post, I will talk about some of reasons I like Haskell. Please keep in mind that I am relatively new to Haskell and the contents of this blog post are about my experience as a beginner. That being said, the intended audience of this blog post is people coming from an OOP background that are looking for something better. Purity In a Purely Functional language like Haskell, it's impossible to mutate objects in memory. While this may seem like a limitation, I assure you it is not. In Haskell, functions must take input and return output, but they may not have side effects. This has great benefits as it makes it easier to reason about code, and the compiler...