Frank Atanassow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
> D. Tweed writes:
> > However, the issue that lots of the simple & productive ideas
> > from FP are culturally alien & even suspect to programmers in other
> > languages is very true. I write lots of stuff in C++ and the fact that I
> > have functions returning two results return a pair<T,U> rather than either
> > a specially created class or a copy-into-reference-parameter, or that I
> > use STL vectors/lists rather than writing inplace code using
> > arrays/pointers elicits cries of `Yuck' & `Too weird'. And I agree that
> > this is a real phenomenon/problem which may well lead to Haskell remaining
> > a language that's scorned (in both senses) and runtime systems which make
> > it difficult to do simple Haskell things.
>
> [Written with tongue only halfway in cheek.]
>
> I disagree. "They just don't get it" doesn't cut it anymore.
>
> Proposition
> Hackers can like FP.
[..]
> Proof 1:
> By contradiction.
>
> Nothing could be more obscure or esoteric to a hacker than FP. (They even
> seem to admit it themselves.)
I don't see the validity of this point. Especially, given
that much of todays hackerdom originated in the Lisp
communities. For example, when I talked with ESR about
programming languages, he said that one of the things he
misses in Python is fully-fledged lambda abstractions.
> Of course, many hacker sapiens are something less than open-minded. You only
> need to look at /. to convince yourself of that.
Never confuse wannabees
<http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/wannabee.html>
with the real thing.
> And if you _can't_ convince a guru and write better programs faster, then
> maybe FP isn't so good after all... unless you plan on writing all the world's
> programs yourself.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't see many FP programs that are better or faster than
> conventional ones. Those that are are incestuous: things like compilers and
> program analyzers for FP languages. Hackers don't need those yet. They need
> things like Manuel's Gtk interface, or Daan's DB interface. Then they need to
> see them in action, outperforming existing applications in some way.
I think, the critical thing here is not outperforming
existing applications, but saving time developing new
applications. If there is one thing a hacker hates, then it
is wasting time on doing a job that could be done more
efficiently[1] or repeatedly doing a job that could be
automated.
Manuel
[1] The exception is of course where doing the job is the
end, not a means.
