Editorial

Abstract

Eighteen years ago Richard Bird joined the editorial team of the Journal of Functional Programming . As Richard mentions in his recollections (Bird, 2006), the founding editors of the Journal , Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler, had asked him to contribute a regular column to be called Functional Pearls , roughly modeled on the Programming Pearls that Jon Bentley had run for the Communications of the ACM in the 1980s. Richard agreed to the suggestion, but only under the proviso that he would seek other contributors to the column.