GoingDeep: C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 12 of 13

We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).

We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.

In Chapter 12, Lazy Evaluation, Dr. Meijer takes us on a journey into the world of order of evaluation (when expressions are evaluated). In the case of lazy evaluation, computation is delayed until the result of the computation is known to be required. So, when a calculation is needed by a program, lazy evaluation enables the real time compuation of the result of some calculation (some expression).

Most programming languages that most of you use day to day use eager or strict evaluation, which is the opposite of lazy evaluation. In the strict evaluation world, expressions are evaluated as soon as they are bound to a variable (this is also known as greedy evaluation). In Haskell, laziness is first class!

Tune in. Learn and enjoy!