Let's talk real-world functional programming. Disclosure: I'm a fan of functional programming in Python. (This: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/functional-python-programming)

The usual culprits for functional programming are map(), filter(), generator functions, and the various comprehensions. This is very pleasant and can lead to succinct, expressive code.

The reduce operation …

Here's a nice article on why Facebook, Yahoo and eBay use Hadoop: "Asking Any Question Of All Your Data".

The article has one tiny element of pandering to the SQL hegemonists.

Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it seems like there really are folks who will tell you …

A year and change back, I wrote this on "Exploratory Programming".

It turns out that it was a mistake. While the subclass-expansion technique is a cool way to bang out a program incrementally, in the long run, the subclassing is ill-advised.

The more I look at Python generator functions and …

From time-to-time I hear a few mentions of MapReduce; up until recently, I avoided looking into it.

This month's CACM, however, is chock-full of MapReduce goodness.

After reading some of the articles, I decided to look a little more closely at that approach to handling large datasets.