On Nov 7, 2006, at 8:19 PM, Sasha Pachev wrote:
I confess - I am not smart enough to get it. I think a functional
language is somewhat similar to a GUI interface - something that
goes against the sequential nature of the current CPU architecture
that were are still stuck with. Yes, we pipeline and multi-process,
but we are still sequential. The difference between the two is that
GUI is fit to be used by general public, while a functional
language only by a fairly small community of programmers that
naturally think that way.
Lisp is an applicative-order language, so everything happens in the
same order in which it would in C, Java, etc. It's neither purely
functional (you can mutate variables, use objects, etc) nor lazy (the
evaluation order is strictly specified). It's got looping
constructs, function calls, a printf-like function, etc. You could
learn it just fine if you felt like doing it; I know you're not
dumb. It's got a learning curve, but it's not THAT bad.
Haskell and similar languages are where things get weird, but
although they don't work like the underlying hardware does, they /do/
work like mathematics does. Plenty of people can do math; they could
probably write Haskell programs too, if they felt like taking the
time to learn it. People who can't do math should probably stay away
from it, though. ;)
--Levi
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