5 ms·

Author is slyly redefining "what's worked" to "what's widely used".

by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

chubot 11y ago
What are some examples of things that "worked" but are not "widely used"? Erlang?
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked. It's moving more and more into mainstream languages. Either as a sublanguage (Linq) or by piecemeal incorporation of its concepts (pattern matching, anonymous functions, TCO so recursion can be used penalty-free, etc.).
  - dikaiosune 11y ago
    I think the same could be said of the fancy type system segment (although I'm not entirely sure why those were disjoint -- they so frequently go hand in hand).
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      Yes. Should've included that. The type theory that came from functional languages is moving into the mainstream languages, too.
  - pron 11y ago
    > Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked How do you know? By "worked" the author means "has unambiguously turned out to be a good idea with very significant benefits". That some people really like something and are able to write good, working programs with it doesn't mean it's "worked" in the sense discussed. First, each of these languages is "functional" in a very different way, so much so that even their inclusion in the same category is tenuous. Second, none of these (except maybe Erlang) has been used extensively enough in large-scale projects to give us a definitive answer regarding the actual benefits. That functional concepts are finding their way into the mainstream is very true, but some of these have also been associated with OO for a very long time now (in fact, they've been a part of OO longer than three of the four FP languages you list have existed). Smalltalk, the most OO of OO languages, had anonymous functions from the beginning, and would tell you that anonymous functions are just as much OO as functional. TCO is not very mainstream, and as Guy Steele demonstrated, is just as relevant for OO as it is for functional. Also, adoption of some concepts doesn't mean FP as a paradigm has worked (the bigger problem is that FP doesn't even have a definition; it is continuously redefined to mean whatever it is people associate with languages that call themselves FP). In short, we're not sure quite yet, hence "maybe".
    - markatkinson 11y ago
      I agree with you that from the perspective of the article Functional Programming is still a "maybe" as it doesn't have the same sort of following or use in large-scale projects as OO, but I suppose it might be the perspective of the article that is incorrect. Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang, and other programming languages like Elixir are starting to gain traction as they improve on the older Frameworks and make development more "comfortable". Whether they will get enough traction and garner enough of a following to become a "Yes" from this articles perspective is difficult to say but I am confident people will see the light of FP sooner than they think, and I feel like it won't be long till FP is the new cool kid on the block, I'm just not sure who will be responsible for leading that.
      - pron 11y ago
        > Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang Whatsapp demonstrated the power of actors and lightweight threads with Erlang. FP had little to do with that.
        markatkinson 11y ago
        Good point... I suppose that is also what Elixir is bringing to the party.
      - discreteevent 11y ago
        "Is Erlang object oriented? Joe Armstrong: Smalltalk got a lot of the things right. So if your question is about what I think about object oriented programming, I sort of changed my mind over that. I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language. Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism. Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back. But you don't really do that and you don't really have isolation which is one of the problems. Dan Ingalls said yesterday (I thought it was very nice) about messaging that once you got messaging, you don't have to care where the message came from. You don't really have to care, the runtime system has to organize the delivery of the message, we don't have to care about how it's processed. It sort of decouples the sender and the receiver in this kind of mutual way. That's why I love messaging. The 3 things that object oriented programming has it's messaging, which is possibly the most important thing. The next thing is isolation and that's what I talked about earlier, that my program shouldn't crash your program, if the 2 things are isolated, then any mistakes I make in my program will not crash your program. This is certainly not true with Java. You cannot take 2 Java applications, bung them in the JVM and one of them still halts the machine and the other one will halt as well. You can crash somebody else's application, so they are not isolated. The third thing you want is polymorphism. Polymorphism is especially regarding messaging, that's just there for the programmer's convenience. It's very nice to have for all objects or all processes or whatever you call them, to have a printMe method - "Go print yourself" and then they print themselves. That's because the programmers, if they all got different names, the programmer is never going to remember this, so it's a polymorphism. It just means "OK, all objects have a printMe method. All objects have a what's your size method or introspection method." Erlang has got all these things. It's got isolation, it's got polymorphism and it's got pure messaging. From that point of view, we might say it's the only object oriented language and perhaps I was a bit premature in saying that object oriented languages are about. You can try it and see it for yourself." http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
- tikhonj 11y ago
  From this article's list: "fancy" type systems, functional programming, RISC (!). Formal methods, albeit in specific domains. Security? (I'm not even sure how we can say whether "security works" or not.) Erlang is a good specific example. Haskell and OCaml are others. (I've seen first hand just how incredibly well OCaml works at Jane Street, even if almost nobody else uses it.) SMT solvers are another cool example. They're used by certain kinds of researchers (including "applied" research like at security companies), but most people haven't even heard of them. At the same time, they let you do some absurd things surprisingly easily that seem intractable. Everything from exhaustively verifying algorithms and invariants to automatically detecting and debugging bugs on the fly to running code backwards. And they make a whole bunch of less absurd but still useful constraint-based problems virtually trivial. Lots of people would benefit from them—if they knew about them and cared. Another great example is the Nix package manager which does package manager magic, but hasn't caught on yet. This is partly a function of its limited ecosystem and documentation, but it does work and I know people using it in production. Hell, for some definition of "widely used", Emacs and VIM fall under this banner. They're somewhat more popular than functional programming and the like, but, in the grand scheme of things, they're a narrow niche among everyday programmers.
pron 11y ago
I think he's defining "worked" to be "clearly demonstrated to be significantly beneficial for a wide range of applications in numerous production uses in the industry". Seems reasonable.

Author is slyly redefining "what's worked" to "what's widely used".

chubot 11y ago

What are some examples of things that "worked" but are not "widely used"? Erlang?

Jtsummers 11y ago
Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked. It's moving more and more into mainstream languages. Either as a sublanguage (Linq) or by piecemeal incorporation of its concepts (pattern matching, anonymous functions, TCO so recursion can be used penalty-free, etc.).
- dikaiosune 11y ago
  I think the same could be said of the fancy type system segment (although I'm not entirely sure why those were disjoint -- they so frequently go hand in hand).
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    Yes. Should've included that. The type theory that came from functional languages is moving into the mainstream languages, too.
- pron 11y ago
  > Functional programming, even when not in, strictly speaking, functional programming languages (MLs, Haskell, lisps, Erlang), has worked How do you know? By "worked" the author means "has unambiguously turned out to be a good idea with very significant benefits". That some people really like something and are able to write good, working programs with it doesn't mean it's "worked" in the sense discussed. First, each of these languages is "functional" in a very different way, so much so that even their inclusion in the same category is tenuous. Second, none of these (except maybe Erlang) has been used extensively enough in large-scale projects to give us a definitive answer regarding the actual benefits. That functional concepts are finding their way into the mainstream is very true, but some of these have also been associated with OO for a very long time now (in fact, they've been a part of OO longer than three of the four FP languages you list have existed). Smalltalk, the most OO of OO languages, had anonymous functions from the beginning, and would tell you that anonymous functions are just as much OO as functional. TCO is not very mainstream, and as Guy Steele demonstrated, is just as relevant for OO as it is for functional. Also, adoption of some concepts doesn't mean FP as a paradigm has worked (the bigger problem is that FP doesn't even have a definition; it is continuously redefined to mean whatever it is people associate with languages that call themselves FP). In short, we're not sure quite yet, hence "maybe".
  - markatkinson 11y ago
    I agree with you that from the perspective of the article Functional Programming is still a "maybe" as it doesn't have the same sort of following or use in large-scale projects as OO, but I suppose it might be the perspective of the article that is incorrect. Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang, and other programming languages like Elixir are starting to gain traction as they improve on the older Frameworks and make development more "comfortable". Whether they will get enough traction and garner enough of a following to become a "Yes" from this articles perspective is difficult to say but I am confident people will see the light of FP sooner than they think, and I feel like it won't be long till FP is the new cool kid on the block, I'm just not sure who will be responsible for leading that.
    - pron 11y ago
      > Whatsapp has demonstrated the power of FP with Erlang Whatsapp demonstrated the power of actors and lightweight threads with Erlang. FP had little to do with that.
      - markatkinson 11y ago
        Good point... I suppose that is also what Elixir is bringing to the party.
    - discreteevent 11y ago
      "Is Erlang object oriented? Joe Armstrong: Smalltalk got a lot of the things right. So if your question is about what I think about object oriented programming, I sort of changed my mind over that. I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language. Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism. Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back. But you don't really do that and you don't really have isolation which is one of the problems. Dan Ingalls said yesterday (I thought it was very nice) about messaging that once you got messaging, you don't have to care where the message came from. You don't really have to care, the runtime system has to organize the delivery of the message, we don't have to care about how it's processed. It sort of decouples the sender and the receiver in this kind of mutual way. That's why I love messaging. The 3 things that object oriented programming has it's messaging, which is possibly the most important thing. The next thing is isolation and that's what I talked about earlier, that my program shouldn't crash your program, if the 2 things are isolated, then any mistakes I make in my program will not crash your program. This is certainly not true with Java. You cannot take 2 Java applications, bung them in the JVM and one of them still halts the machine and the other one will halt as well. You can crash somebody else's application, so they are not isolated. The third thing you want is polymorphism. Polymorphism is especially regarding messaging, that's just there for the programmer's convenience. It's very nice to have for all objects or all processes or whatever you call them, to have a printMe method - "Go print yourself" and then they print themselves. That's because the programmers, if they all got different names, the programmer is never going to remember this, so it's a polymorphism. It just means "OK, all objects have a printMe method. All objects have a what's your size method or introspection method." Erlang has got all these things. It's got isolation, it's got polymorphism and it's got pure messaging. From that point of view, we might say it's the only object oriented language and perhaps I was a bit premature in saying that object oriented languages are about. You can try it and see it for yourself." http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop http://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop
tikhonj 11y ago
From this article's list: "fancy" type systems, functional programming, RISC (!). Formal methods, albeit in specific domains. Security? (I'm not even sure how we can say whether "security works" or not.) Erlang is a good specific example. Haskell and OCaml are others. (I've seen first hand just how incredibly well OCaml works at Jane Street, even if almost nobody else uses it.) SMT solvers are another cool example. They're used by certain kinds of researchers (including "applied" research like at security companies), but most people haven't even heard of them. At the same time, they let you do some absurd things surprisingly easily that seem intractable. Everything from exhaustively verifying algorithms and invariants to automatically detecting and debugging bugs on the fly to running code backwards. And they make a whole bunch of less absurd but still useful constraint-based problems virtually trivial. Lots of people would benefit from them—if they knew about them and cared. Another great example is the Nix package manager which does package manager magic, but hasn't caught on yet. This is partly a function of its limited ecosystem and documentation, but it does work and I know people using it in production. Hell, for some definition of "widely used", Emacs and VIM fall under this banner. They're somewhat more popular than functional programming and the like, but, in the grand scheme of things, they're a narrow niche among everyday programmers.

pron 11y ago

I think he's defining "worked" to be "clearly demonstrated to be significantly beneficial for a wide range of applications in numerous production uses in the industry". Seems reasonable.