On 03/10/2010 10:09 AM, James Iry wrote:
I'm going to assume you meant "enforce" rather than "support" because
both languages support immutability and purity precisely to the
extent that the programmers want to use them (although, of the two,
Scala's standard library has far more support).
But even if you mean "enforce", you've still got a strange point of
view.
Functional programming means (a) first-order functions, and (b)
immutability. There are no ifs and buts about it. Every text on
functional programming says as much. Even Wikipedia :o), but I'd
recommend this classic:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf
The rest (lambdas, extensive use of recursion, pattern matching, let and
letrec, monads, system(at)ic laziness) is aftermath, i.e. mechanisms
that make it convenient to program given (a) and (b). There are no ifs
and buts about that either.
Giving FP lip service by adopting FP's window dressing and syntactic
sugar while at the same time not giving due consideration to FP's two
fundamental tenets is, in my opinion, an ungainly move in the long term.
Andrei
