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Great talk. Particularly the bit on the value of naming things - I rather wish he'd flogged that a bit harder. As time goes on I'm finding it more and more fr

Great talk. Particularly the bit on the value of naming things - I rather wish he'd flogged that a bit harder. As time goes on I'm finding it more and more frustrating to try and maintain code that relies entirely on anonymous and structural constructs without any nominal component. Yes, I do feel super-powerful when I can bang out a bunch of code really quickly by just stacking a bunch of more-or-less purely mathematical constructs on top of each other. . . but as the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter should teach us rather poignantly, when you're trying to engineer larger, more complex systems it turns out that meta-information is actually really useful stuff.

the_af 13y ago
I'd say static typing and purity as advocated by FP are some of the tools one wants when trying to engineer larger, more complex systems. I wasn't familiar with the Mars Climate Orbiter case, but a cursory reading suggests one of the causes was a type error (confusing newtons with pound-force).
- bunderbunder 13y ago
  As advocated widely in the FP blogosphere. . . not necessarily as commonly practiced in FP programming culture, or supported by many FP languages. For example, I strongly prefer F# to its cousin OCaml largely because F# uses nominal typing and OCaml uses structural typing. I've also got some misgivings about being overly reliant on type inference. Both structural typing and advanced type inference are admittedly incredibly convenient. What worries me is that they also seem to be incredibly convenient as ways to obfuscate the programmer's intent w/r/t types and their semantics.
  - the_af 13y ago
    I'd say not so much as advocated by the blogosphere (which can be annoying, as fans of almost anything often are), but by the people actually designing and using FP languages. In any case, there is certainly valid criticism of FP, but Bracha's just isn't it. My impression is that the guy -- as clever as he may be in other areas -- barely understands FP, and makes disparaging remarks about things he isn't familiar with. Read his blog; every assertion he makes is shown to be incorrect or misleading by people who do understand FP, like Tony Morris or (very politely) Philip Wadler himself.

the_af 13y ago

I'd say static typing and purity as advocated by FP are some of the tools one wants when trying to engineer larger, more complex systems. I wasn't familiar with the Mars Climate Orbiter case, but a cursory reading suggests one of the causes was a type error (confusing newtons with pound-force).

bunderbunder 13y ago
As advocated widely in the FP blogosphere. . . not necessarily as commonly practiced in FP programming culture, or supported by many FP languages. For example, I strongly prefer F# to its cousin OCaml largely because F# uses nominal typing and OCaml uses structural typing. I've also got some misgivings about being overly reliant on type inference. Both structural typing and advanced type inference are admittedly incredibly convenient. What worries me is that they also seem to be incredibly convenient as ways to obfuscate the programmer's intent w/r/t types and their semantics.
- the_af 13y ago
  I'd say not so much as advocated by the blogosphere (which can be annoying, as fans of almost anything often are), but by the people actually designing and using FP languages. In any case, there is certainly valid criticism of FP, but Bracha's just isn't it. My impression is that the guy -- as clever as he may be in other areas -- barely understands FP, and makes disparaging remarks about things he isn't familiar with. Read his blog; every assertion he makes is shown to be incorrect or misleading by people who do understand FP, like Tony Morris or (very politely) Philip Wadler himself.