Welcome to Fexl

[Patrick Chkoreff]

For those who are interested in functional programming, welcome to
Fexl! I am currently working on getting out the first open source
version of the Fexl interpreter. This will be our forum for
discussing the philosophy, implementation, and use of functional
programming languages, particularly Fexl.

[Lewis Van Winkle]

Hi Patrick,

I'm the guy that kept asking all the dumb questions over at Hacker
News. It's good to see you have a pseudo-blog setup and a discussion
group. Using HN for discussion was getting a little awkward. Hopefully
some others will join in the conversation soon.

Fexl seems very interesting, but sadly a lot of what you're writing
about is currently still over my head. I am trying to learn though.

-Lewis

[Patrick Chkoreff]

On Oct 3, 2:04 am, Lewis Van Winkle <lewisvanwin...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Fexl seems very interesting, but sadly a lot of what you're writing
> about is currently still over my head. I am trying to learn though.

Keep in mind that I'm writing about implementation details and big-
time theory of high order functions -- which are *not* something I
expect Fexl programmers to know or care about. I want people to be
able to program in Fexl without really knowing that they're
"programming" at all.

For example my first application for Fexl, using the old Perl
implementation which I'm currently busy making obsolete, was to
generate simple dynamic web pages. So you could just say simple
things like this:

header;
body;
footer

After suitable definitions like:

\header = ( ... )
\body = ( ... )
\footer = ( ... )

Someone writing code like that doesn't even need to be a "programmer"
in the professional or academic sense, and they certainly don't need
to know about C, S, I and Y.

I'm going to get the C language implementation done, but it was a big
step going from a quick and dirty Perl implementation that I only used
internally and nobody else could see, all the way to C code I could be
proud of. So please bear with me.


-- Patrick