On 4/16/07, Jacques Carette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And remember one thing that we learned the hard way (on a doomed project > at a company I used to work for): do NOT try to find a circuits analogy > to classical imperative programming -- it's a fool's errand. We wasted > a lot of time on that, before realizing that classical imperative > programming is best done in classical imperative languages. Solving > higher-level problems which did not embody a natural "control strategy" > was on the other hand well-suited to circuits kind of thinking.
Agreed. In a lot of papers on functional-reactive programming I see examples which do something like integrate a function or simulate some dynamic physics system, with all the low-level logic written using FRP constructs. Maybe it's just me, but these examples strike me as awkward---they could just as easily be written in a functional way. It's really the high-level management of the issues encountered when interfacing these systems together as components that makes FRP appealing to me, and I conjecture that the same would hold true for a circuit-based paradigm. Writing a 10-band EQ module using circuits would likely be awkward, but representing the EQ module itself as a chip and connecting it to a "microphone" chip, a "VU meter" chip, and a "speaker" chip has already been proven to be a good idea (witness Simulink, LabVIEW, Max/MSP, etc.). I'm not very familiar with Erlang but I understand it works the same way... low-level components are written in the language du jour while Erlang handles the high-level distributed programming stuff. - Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
