6 Jun
2013
6 Jun
'13
4:57 p.m.
On 06/06/13 4:50 PM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Tue, 04 Jun 2013 20:26:19 -0400
Toby Thain<toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
Very true. A programming language is a tool. ...
Yes, of course, the Lisp and Fortran forks of the tree occurred around
the same time.
But functional programming languages today represent major advances over
*mainstream* imperative languages in expressivity and - with a type
system like Haskell's or Scala's - correctness and productivity.
Neglecting the past 40 years of functional programming R&D is probably
the biggest single most costly mistake of the industry. In this sense,
an acknowledgement of that intellectual input *is* major progress.
The mainstream languages have a lot of catching up to do (some of them
now have closures of various shades of broken-ness, which Scheme made
solid in 1975, but it will be a long wait for the rest...)
--Toby
Were the
engineers elitiats as well? (FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING WILL SOLVE
ALL PROBLEMS!!!)
Nobody claims it solves all problems. But it certainly solves
some
important ones. Progress *is* allowed, you know.
Functional programming is no progress. It is as old as imperative
programming. But it can be progress for a programmer to learn and use
functional programming, as it teaches you a different way to think.