2008/12/10 Tracy Harms <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > This article has been catching some attention. > ...................... > http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/212201710;jsessionid=3MQLTTYJRPL3CQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN
Or: http://www.ddj.com/development-tools/212201710 However, the article is rather shallow, late as introductory, omits important facts, and misleading at places. We long since have functional programming in mainstream languages, e.g. scripting ones, but now also in C#, C++ (since next year), D, ... The author should have certainly not forgotten APL/J/K, let alone JavaScript! And it's bizarre to mention OCaml and F# but omit ML. Contrary to author's assertion, Scala and F# are not lazy languages, and Erlang is not purely functional. By the way, the author emphasizes lazyness and pattern matching as characteristic of functional languages, but cares not to explain what these are. Also, he says that recursion is "the primary tool for iteration", but fails to add that it is very often implicit, concealed, due to plain-applicative (a.k.a. function-level) style, much preferred in modern f.p. The "canonical example" in Haskell is hardly factorial n = if n > 0 then n * factorial (n-1) else 1 Rather, it is factorial n = product [1..n] (where product = foldr1 (*)). --Boyko ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
