So, evidently I failed to fulfill my ambition to blog regularly about the contents of my planned book on Patterns in Functional Programming. But I have been making progress. I had the privilege of another sabbatical 2024-2025, in which I managed to draft the entire book.

It’s in short chapters, following the example set by Dexter Kozen in his lovely books: the idea is that each chapter is roughly one lecture’s worth of material. I had 40 to 50 chapter ideas, and 40 to 50 weeks in my sabbatical, so diligently stuck to one chapter per week for a year—if this week’s chapter wasn’t finished by the end of the week, it was put aside anyway in order to move on to the next chapter the following week.

That did mean that although I ended the year with a draft of the entire book, it did have many gaps and to-dos remaining. Reality hit at the end of my sabbatical in October 2025, and it has taken me the best part of another year around actual responsibilities to fill in most of the gaps and knock off most of the to-dos. I have also had the benefit of a number of readers (thank you, everyone!), with many helpful comments to implement.

But I have just yesterday sent a complete polished version to the publisher, Cambridge University Press, for the input of a professional copyeditor. I still have to construct an index, write solutions for the many exercises (which may appear separately from the book itself, in order to keep the length and hence the cost down), and make my own proof-reading pass. I am hoping to complete those tasks and implement the copyeditor’s eventual corrections over the summer, and that the book will finally appear before the end of 2026.

The image is my mock-up of the cover of the book. The painting is Kekub by Victor Vasarely. There is a provisional table of contents on my webpage.

About jeremygibbons

Jeremy Gibbons is Professor of Computing in Oxford University Department of Computer Science, and a fan of functional programming and patterns of computation.

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