I’ve got a chance to share a part of my upcoming book here. It is an excerpt from the second chapter.

The main feature of all functional programming languages is that functions can be treated like ordinary values. They can be saved into variables, put into collections and structures, passed to other functions as arguments, and also returned from other functions as results.

Functions that take other functions as arguments, or that return new functions are called higher-order functions. Higher-order functions is probably the most important concept in functional programming. As you might know, programs can be made more concise and efficient by describing what the program should do on a higher level, with the help of standard algorithms, instead of implementing everything by hand. Higher-order functions are indispensable for that. They allow us to define abstract behaviours and more complex control structures than those provided by the C++ programming language.

See the whole excerpt in this PDF

I’ve just returned from Meeting C++.

There were couple of really nice talks – some less technical like the one from Jon Kalb of CppCon to the low level ones like the Rainer’s talk about the memory model of C++. Also, seing Bjarne Stroustrup in-person was a pleasure.

Sadly, I was not able to watch all the talks that I wanted (including Arne’s), but I plan to do so once the recordings are posted online.

My talk was about functional design and reactive programming. The slides are available here. I’ll post the link to the recording as soon as it is uploaded.

Unfortunately, there was no support for DisplayPort nor VGA at the venue, and I didn’t have a HDMI adapter on me, so I had to give my presentation from a friend’s computer (thanks Goran!) without any demos, but I’d say it all went well.

Next year, I’ll probably give a talk about immutable (aka functional) data structures. We’ll see. :)

I was hoping to announce this at Meeting C++, but the guys at Manning were a bit faster than I expected. :)

For those of you who know me, you have probably noticed that I talk a lot about functional programming at C++ conferences like Meeting C++, Qt Con, Qt Dev Days and such. The good people at Manning noticed that as well and offered me to write a book on Functional Programming in C++.

I’ve been keeping this under the wraps for some time now, but the book is now officially announced and the first two chapters are made available through the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). There will be a new chapter coming out each month.

For the following two days (starting November 7th, 00:00 US ET), it will be the Deal of the Day. You can use the code dotd110716au on the Deal of the Day page.

You can see more information about the topics planned to be covered in the book at the book homepage: Functional Programming in C++

There will also be a discount on “Grokking Functional Programming” (a quite interesting FP book from what I’ve seen) and “Functional Programming in C#”.

As you might have seen, we are coming close to the most awesome Free/Libre Software conference – Akademy – the one and only place where you can meet a few hundred KDE contributors. It will be held in Berlin as a part and continuation of QtCon.

I’m going to give a talk there about all things that are wrong with the QFuture, and the things that might be fixed in the future (pun intended).

In general, futures are a great concept that allow developers to easily implement asynchronous and concurrent systems. But, why isn’t it the case with QFuture? I’ll try to cover a few things like what is wrong with the idea behind QFuture, what is wrong with its API, should we go for std::future (or boost::future instead and similar.

See you there!

p.s. If you are going to Akademy, you are free to use the above banner in your blogs and such. It is not the official VDG banner (we don’t have the official one yet as far as I know), but Jens likes it so it is almost as if it was the official one. :)

It comes in two different sizes, the regular and the slim one.

Berlin is still the city to be in if you are interested in C++ and/or Qt. At least, if you are in Europe and don’t like the idea of flying across the ocean to go to CppCon.

The first conference will be in September, and it will join the KDE, Qt, VideoLAN and FSFE communities. It is a continuation of the Qt Dev Days and Qt World Summit for Europe, and it is called QtCon.

The second conference is becoming a true tradition, even for me, and it stays true to its original name – Meeting C++. It will be in November this time, which is a pitty since Berlin in December is filled with beautiful christmas markets which provided all the Meeting C++ participants great time last few years.