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He's likely arguing against any non-Functional Language. "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.
by kevindication 16y ago
He's likely arguing against any non-Functional Language. "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance.
- bad_user 16y agoNo, he's probably arguing in favor of expressions (i.e. stuff that returns values). Smalltalk has expressions everywhere, with control blocks being just closures passed to methods on objects ... a < b ifTrue: [^'A is less than B'] ifFalse: [^'A is greater or equal to B'] > "Purely functional" Lisp has no statements, side-effects, etc, for instance. Such a Lisp also has no users.
- ekiru 16y agoAnd no implementations.
- lmkg 16y agoIncorrect: ACL2, an industry-standard automated theorem-prover, is written in a side-effect-free variant of Common Lisp. It has both an implementation and users, including users outside of academia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACL2
- moe 16y agoI guess both (no implementations, no users) were meant in relative terms, and in that light they describe reality pretty well. Hands up, who has heard of ACL2 before?
- rbanffy 16y agoI did. In fact, I am appalled so few people, apparently, heard of it.
- jrockway 16y agoAny programming language that can't be cut-n-pasted from fifty different websites to make my SQL-injection-rich AJAX social awesome NoSQL site just isn't worth knowing. Theorem proving -- you ain't gonna need it! What's next, you're going to tell me you write unit tests? Hahahahah.
- rbanffy 16y agoIn theory, at least, I wouldn't need them for I proof the program is correct ;-)
- sigstoat 16y agome. i've even used similar tools.