Zipcar

I took Zipcar to drive Ginneh to a job interview yesterday. Zipcar is cool and convenient, but we got lost, Ginneh got me more lost, then we were 20 minutes late and had to pay a $50 late fee. :-/ I suppose that's not the most expensive mistake one could make with a car... (That aside, I only got somewhat lost three times and had three near-death experiences while driving from Kiva Systems to Porter Square and back, pretty on par for normal Boston driving.)

Haskell Rocks!

I've been messing around with Haskell lately, and while I am still a total beginner, I'm greatly enjoying it. If brevity is the soul of wit, Haskell is a very witty programming language indeed (and it's humor is quite comprehensible, compared to something like K). For example, the following is a (sort of) quick sort implementation:

qsort []     = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)

The following is a program that takes a list of words on standard input and shows all the groups of anagrams (created with heavy borrowing of code from here):

import Control.Arrow ((&&&))
import qualified Data.Map as M
import Data.Char (isAlpha)
import Data.List (sort)

clusterBy f = M.elems . M.fromListWith (++) . map (f &&& return)
signature = filter isAlpha . sort
anagrams = filter ((> 1) . length) . clusterBy signature
main = (mapM_ print . anagrams . lines) =<< getContents

All functions are strongly typed (but with a huge degree of polymorphism (functions can take inputs of more than one type)). This typing is done intelligently, so you don't have to explicitly create type signatures for your functions unless you want to (for example, I could note that anagrams takes a list of strings and returns a list of lists of strings by adding anagrams :: [String] -> [[String]] before the function declaration, but this is already defined automatically). Functions can be defined in terms of pattern matching, as in the quick sort example above. And all functions are curried (takes parameters in sequence, returning the modified function) automatically, so you can do things like this:

sum = foldr (+) 0
  -- so that sum [1,2,3] -> 6
increment = (+) 1
  -- so that increment 3 -> 4