On 23 March 2011 17:05, Russel Winder <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 2011-03-21 at 20:22 -0700, Cédric Beust ♔ wrote: > [ . . . ] > > > > It looks like whoever made that decision has a pretty big chip on > > their shoulder and it's pretty clear from that sentence alone that > > students going to his/her class will get a pretty incomplete and > > biased picture. > [ . . . ] > > > > I think we can see fallout from the 1980s. Then it was Imperative vs. > Declarative but rather than coming to any sane resolution, the battle > evolved into Functional vs Object-oriented. Of course C was what people > who weren't using Pascal, Fortran, Ada, Modula-2, Smalltalk, etc. were > using and thus C++ became the poster child of object-orientation. Which > in itself is a bit strange as the object-oriented of C++ wasn't the > object-oriented that the object-oriented folk were fighting for! > > My experience is that most folk familiar with FP are still thinking of it in terms of imperative vs declarative, and only those firmly entrenched in C++ and its offspring seem to think that OO is somehow the opposite to FP.
In many ways, declarative programming *has* become wildly successful, and was almost guaranteed to be used in any system with a data storage requirement prior to the NoSQL movement - making it more widely adopted than Java, C++, C#, etc. Even now, all the NoSQL alternatives that I've seen have a declarative query syntax, with SQL already having proved the power of this paradigm when it came to clustering, sharding, and other such requirements for an application to scale outwards. As for the OO that folk were originally asking for; independent units that communicate by message passing, we now have it. That particular style is now known as actors, and the current showcase for the technique is Erlang, typically considered to be an FP sort of a language. It does amuse me how these things so often come full circle... In the UK, successive governments have over the last 20 years tried to > destroy the university system. Most of the quality > imperative-supporting programmers/teachers left for sensible work--life > balance and salaries, leaving a much higher percentage of > declarative/functional-supporting folk in academia. These people > remember the 1980s and are now going in for the final victory of the > Paradigm Wars. Looks like something analogous is happening in the USA. > > Did you fight in the Paradigm Wars? > > -- > Russel. > > ============================================================================= > Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: > sip:[email protected] > 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: [email protected] > London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder > -- Kevin Wright gtalk / msn : [email protected] <[email protected]>mail: [email protected] vibe / skype: kev.lee.wright quora: http://www.quora.com/Kevin-Wright twitter: @thecoda "My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger" ~ Dijkstra -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
