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Interesting! All I know about .NET is that the native ORM is apparently awesome (second-hand opinion, no less, and I can't even correctly recall its name). I

Interesting! All I know about .NET is that the native ORM is apparently awesome (second-hand opinion, no less, and I can't even correctly recall its name). I learned a little Scheme to try and help a friend while I was in college, but that's about the extent of my exposure to functional languages... it seems like a real shame that this style of development is apparently so highly-regarded but doesn't get much attention in early programmer education. I definitely see the utility of OOP, and as far as marketability goes it's still the good bet, but it'd be great to see better resources for functional programming.

kyllo 14y ago
LINQ is the name of what you're describing. The ML family is quite different from Scheme. ML's salient feature is its powerful type checking system. It allows you to almost eliminate runtime errors. Functional programming used to get much more attention from universities than it does now. So did C. Now they're trending toward doing everything in Java, which is what industry seems to want, but it's dumbing down the education. Classic rant post about this phenomenon can be found here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...
- obviouslygreen 14y ago
  Yep, that's the one! Thanks again. Despite often not totally agreeing with Joel, I taught myself and my classmates C and then C++ in high school, re-learned C++ in college, and am one of those people who railed against Java as a replacement. My knee-jerk reaction would be that functional programming isn't an important skill for industry... but then neither are the low-level RDBMS classes I took as requirements, and I'm sure a lot of other people could chime in with "US university failed to prepare me for work" stories of their own, so that's beaten to death. I'm getting over my reactive Java loathing thanks to Android, but man, it'd still be nice to get people learning functional and procedural and object-oriented programming.
  - laichzeit0 14y ago
    What's fantastic about Java is not the Java language but that you now get a JVM for just about every platform. You have Java, Groovy, Scala, Closure, etc. all these programming languages you could pick from and you get cross-platform support for free as well as being able to use all the thousands of Java libraries that are already out there. It's a powerful combination.

kyllo 14y ago

LINQ is the name of what you're describing. The ML family is quite different from Scheme. ML's salient feature is its powerful type checking system. It allows you to almost eliminate runtime errors. Functional programming used to get much more attention from universities than it does now. So did C. Now they're trending toward doing everything in Java, which is what industry seems to want, but it's dumbing down the education. Classic rant post about this phenomenon can be found here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

obviouslygreen 14y ago
Yep, that's the one! Thanks again. Despite often not totally agreeing with Joel, I taught myself and my classmates C and then C++ in high school, re-learned C++ in college, and am one of those people who railed against Java as a replacement. My knee-jerk reaction would be that functional programming isn't an important skill for industry... but then neither are the low-level RDBMS classes I took as requirements, and I'm sure a lot of other people could chime in with "US university failed to prepare me for work" stories of their own, so that's beaten to death. I'm getting over my reactive Java loathing thanks to Android, but man, it'd still be nice to get people learning functional and procedural and object-oriented programming.
- laichzeit0 14y ago
  What's fantastic about Java is not the Java language but that you now get a JVM for just about every platform. You have Java, Groovy, Scala, Closure, etc. all these programming languages you could pick from and you get cross-platform support for free as well as being able to use all the thousands of Java libraries that are already out there. It's a powerful combination.