These are the slides I prepared for my session on C# 3.0 at the Christchurch Codecamp Nov 1st 2008.

I love kickoff meetings. You meet with a bunch of fellow geeks, PMs, BAs and discuss the upcoming project, with open-armed enthusiam, even though your last project has been a complete disaster.

Well, I kicked off my own "Project Euler" meeting with just me in attendance. Solved problem #1 in a few minutes in C#.

Now, if you're not familiar with Project Euler, this is a set of mathematical problems, resulting in a numeric answer that you enter into a web form to check, giving you a genius rating (mine is currently 1%)  The URL is http://projecteuler.net

The problems range from easy at #1 to pretty darned hard at #171 or what ever the latest number is.

Now, for me, the challenge is to solve the same problem in a F#, since it is on my list to learn a functional language this year (and I am choosing F# because it runs on Visual Studio, amongst other reasons). If I get confident, I hope to solve the problems in F# first, then C#.

There's lots of solutions to the problems. some one liners, some very verbose. What I hope to achieve is to understand the functional programming style through a set of well defined problems. I'll post on some of these observations as I (hopefully) solve the problems.

This is not exactly news, but I found in my internet travels this story : http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/03/21/backus_obit/

about the passing away of John Backus, the original developer of the FORTRAN language.

This brings back memories for me. I am old enough to remember programing in BASIC on an old teletype machine at my school in London (Battersea Grammar School). A bunch of us fellow geeks clubbed together and organised a FORTRAN course at Imperial College, London. From paper tape, we progressed to punch cards. Ahh, those were the days.. You submitted your program to a punch card operator who duly typed in your code and then ran your application, giving you the printout of your success or failure a couple of hours later.

So far away from hitting F5 in Visual Studio...

FORTRAN was in my life for sometime after that. I worked in the Geophysical industry for a while, in Norway and Scotland (for a company called Geoteam). FORTRAN was the language for all the seismic processing applications, which were run on DEC VAX/VMS computers.

I haven't been in that industry for a long time now, but I wonder if good old Fortran (yes it lost its capitalisation, eventually succumbing to fashion) is still used in that industry. There was just so much of that Fortran code...

In that article, there was a link to a paper Backus had written in 1977

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf

about functional programming, entitled

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von