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I think Haskell has been growing a lot fueled by having a really great base language finally getting a pretty comprehensive standard library. This was a highly

by tel 13y ago

I think Haskell has been growing a lot fueled by having a really great base language finally getting a pretty comprehensive standard library. This was a highly intentional group effort that began probably 10 years ago and pushed the Haskell libraries to a level of maturity. I can't truly claim this has driven the adoption of other languages, but Haskell's (or pick some language from the ML roulette) influence on Clojure and Scala is undeniable. Clojure's commitment to immutability pales in comparison to Haskell's, while the latter demonstrates the advantages of such programming in spades. Scala's type system is a novel extension of the HM system which forms the basis of Haskell's. So am I claiming that the increased availability and "practicality" of Haskell has driven a renaissance in functional programming? Sort of, yes, but I don't feel it's the core underlying cause. More a symptom in its own right. These ideas are the leading edge of programming language research. They're smart to learn and to integrate into our next generation of tools. This evidence has long resounded from finding them at the center of the "Holy Trinity" of category theory, logic, and type theory. It's "practical" significance is still growing, however.

NhanH 13y ago
Additionally, I think it's just a matter of "it's ready". We just couldn't have practical functional language 20 years ago, in term of both software and hardware. Back then, GC was a rarity, the JVM didn't exist yet. Software has to be ran on the user slow-ass computer, speed was everything and you didn't care much about concurrency/parallel problem. Nowadays, even if the clock speed didn't stagnate and we have just one super core in desktop computer, we would still write a lot more distributed system on the web now than we used to. Also, we're building more and more complex software over the year. I remember a question for Peter Norvig in "Coders at work", where he was asked about the differences in programming now and back there. In the past, programmers generally had to write (mostly) everything from scratch, and they kept the whole program in their heads. Nowadays, we actually spend most of our time reading other API and trying to plug different components together, referential transparency is simply a godsend. In a sense, I think the change from imperative programming to functional is similar to the one from GOTO to structure programming. May be we need a "Mutable state considered harmful" to push functional languages mainstream ? :-)
- chas 13y ago
  We did have practical functional programming languages 20 years ago. PG has been very vocal about the advantages of using Common Lisp to create Viaweb. Viaweb started the summer of 1995 and meets my bar for practicality. To the best of my knowledge, functional programming languages weren't as widely used then but it was not because no practical languages existed.

by tel 13y ago

NhanH 13y ago

Additionally, I think it's just a matter of "it's ready". We just couldn't have practical functional language 20 years ago, in term of both software and hardware. Back then, GC was a rarity, the JVM didn't exist yet. Software has to be ran on the user slow-ass computer, speed was everything and you didn't care much about concurrency/parallel problem. Nowadays, even if the clock speed didn't stagnate and we have just one super core in desktop computer, we would still write a lot more distributed system on the web now than we used to. Also, we're building more and more complex software over the year. I remember a question for Peter Norvig in "Coders at work", where he was asked about the differences in programming now and back there. In the past, programmers generally had to write (mostly) everything from scratch, and they kept the whole program in their heads. Nowadays, we actually spend most of our time reading other API and trying to plug different components together, referential transparency is simply a godsend. In a sense, I think the change from imperative programming to functional is similar to the one from GOTO to structure programming. May be we need a "Mutable state considered harmful" to push functional languages mainstream ? :-)

chas 13y ago
We did have practical functional programming languages 20 years ago. PG has been very vocal about the advantages of using Common Lisp to create Viaweb. Viaweb started the summer of 1995 and meets my bar for practicality. To the best of my knowledge, functional programming languages weren't as widely used then but it was not because no practical languages existed.