> Unfortunately, these choices won them no respect in the FP community
> (for which, my commentary, shame on the FP community), who chose to
> look down their noses at Sisal for what were essentially trivial and
> shallow reasons (Pascal syntax, focus on those "dirty" arrays instead
> of those "cool" lists, no polymorphism, no higher-order functions,
> ...). This made it MUCH harder for the Sisal team to sell the
> language to their Fortran-writing colleagues, who kept hearing
> negative opinions about Sisal from the FP community.
Being an old fart, I was around when most of this happened, and will
humbly share at least some of the "blame" for this. But in our defense,
this was at the time when there was no "standard" FL and we were trying
to establish Haskell as such a candidate -- and not selfishly, but for
the good of the community, which outsiders viewed as being fragmented
and lacking in terms of a standard language. We encouraged the SISAL
folks to at least use a subset of Haskell for SISAL, but they did not
want to do this -- my strong impression was that they wanted to mark out
their own turf. In hindsight both groups should have supported each
other more, but hindsight is always 20-20.
In any case...
> This may not have been the exclusive reason why Sisal did not take
> off, but I have heard members of the Sisal team say, more than once,
> that this was a major contributor.
I seriously question the claim that it was a major contributor. There
was, and of course still is, an ungodly amount of FORTRAN code out
there, much of which was being reused in the form of libraries, even in
parallel applications. Having to rewrite this code, support a new
language, re-train programmers, etc. were far greater impediments to the
use of SISAL (or any other language instead of Frotran), IMHO.
-Paul
