Abstract

When considering the past or the future, dear apprentice, be mindful of the present. If, while considering the past, you become caught in the past, lost in the past, or enslaved by the past, then you have forgotten yourself in the present. If, while considering the future, you become caught in the future, lost in the future, or enslaved by the future, then you have forgotten yourself in the present. Conversely, when considering the past, if you do not become caught, lost, or enslaved by the past, then you have remained mindful of the present. And if, when considering the future, you do not become caught, lost, or enslaved in the future, then you have remained mindful of the present. [14] Programmers in the real world wrestle everyday to overcome the impedance mismatch between relational data, objects, and XML. We have been working on solving this problem for the past ten years by applying principles from functional programming, in particular monads and comprehensions. By viewing data as monads and formulating queries as comprehensions, it becomes possible to unify the three data models and their corresponding programming languages instead of considering each as a separate special case. To actually bring this within the reach of mainstream programmers we have worked tirelessly on transferring functional programming technology from pure Haskell, via Cω to the upcoming versions of C ♯ 3.0 and Visual Basic 9 and the LINQ framework. Functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Lisp,

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