RudolF: An Open-Source Sandbox for increasing the accessibility of Functional Programming to the Bioinformatics and Scientific Communities

Scientists are continually faced with the need to express complex mathematical notions in code. The renaissance of functional languages such as LISP and Haskell is often credited to their ability to implement complex data opera-tions and mathematical constructs in an expressive and natural idiom. The slow adoption of functional computing in the scientific community does not, however, reflect the congeniality of these fields. Unfortunately, the learning curve for adoption of functional programming techniques is steeper than that for more traditional languages in the scientific community, such as Python and Java, and this is partially due to the relative sparseness of available learn-ing resources. To fill this gap, we demonstrate and pro-vide applied, scientifically substantial examples of func-tional programming which we present as the multi-lan-guage RudolF source-code repository for software integra-tion and algorithm development, which generally focuses on the fields of machine learning, data processing, bioin-formatics. We encourage scientists who are interested in learning the basics of functional programming to adopt, reuse, and contribute to these examples. The source cod