Don’t forget Erlang

Everyone should learn to think functionally and recursively. But how? With which language? I think that one of the best options for functional programming is largely overlooked …

Book review: The Little Schemer by Daniel Friedman

This is an unusual book. The first thing to know is that it does not contain chapters that are made up of paragraphs. It is a list of problems. The only way to gain anything from this book is to do the problems. Sure you may look at the first few and think you get the idea, and feel like you are doing fine just by reading the problems and solutions and thinking about them. But it won’t be long until you realize that you have no idea what is going on, and worse, you won’t know where you lost the trail.

So don’t be lazy, if you are going to read this book, set up an interpreter, and start coding.

The second thing to know about this book is that it does not attempt to teach you the Scheme programming language. Which is good news, because you don’t really want to be a Scheme programmer. What this book does teach, however, is of interest to every programmer.