On Aug 11, 2010, at 7:30 PM, Ketil Malde wrote: > Sure, if the premise is that investment banks (or the military) are evil, > then it is morally questionable to support them. If these are the > major consumers of functional programming, one might question the ethics > of working on FP in general as well. > > But as I interpreted this thread, the premise was not about the morality > of specific sectors, but rather that finance "takes away" too much of > the FP talent.
One (but only one, and I do not say the major one) of the aspects of the "global financial crisis" is that bankers created a number of "advanced" financial instruments which nobody really knew how to value. "Advanced" computational models were developed for the purpose. People were warning about this 10 years ago or more; I bought a couple of books about it from a remainder shop. If functional programming gets associated in the profession's eyes with *that* kind of programming, it will not do FP any good. In any case, what with lambda expressions already in Apple's C (of all languages!), it's clear that FP ideas are becoming mainstream _without_ any need of help from the financial community. (Actually, that particular one is probably due to Objective C with its Smalltalk influence, so the "functional" origin here is ultimately Lisp.) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
