3 ms·

Well you have to take into account the amount of effort, time and manpower spend on different languages and (in-)directly on different paradigms. FP hasn't bee

by DasIch 12y ago

Well you have to take into account the amount of effort, time and manpower spend on different languages and (in-)directly on different paradigms. FP hasn't been given as much attention as imperative programming languages, especially not when it comes to the important last step of language development, which turns ideas that are nice in theory into tools that are actually convenient to use. Java is a good example for how much that matters. The language is inelegant and makes it impossible to express yourself concisely nevertheless the tooling is incredibly good, so good that it makes up for quite a few surprises. A FP IDE that for example shows you inferred types and type errors while you are writing the code, would already help a lot as it could much better visualize the problem, than a compiler that has to describe an error purely with text. FP languages are not perfect, no language is but they have the potential to be much more powerful in lot of ways than imperative languages. Lisp is a good example for this although it's also a good example that such power can corrupt people to use macros in awful ways. In any case when it comes to the rhetoric especially from professors, you have to take into account that they have spent their entire life specializing on what they are doing. Of course they are excited by what they are doing and even if they aren't they have a good reason to lie to themselves consciously or not because the alternative is acknowledging they wasted their life on bullshit. They are biased and that's ok, you just have to be aware of it.

mpweiher 12y ago
Your make some good points, but I don't quite buy them. Turbo Pascal for example was written by a single guy, Anders Hejlsberg, in about 2 years for several platforms in assembly language, and included an integrated (though primitive) text editor/IDE. Smalltalk was taken from ST-72 to ST-80 in 8 years, with small teams that also had to invent/implement complete VMs, operating systems, bitmap graphics engines, GUI framework(s) and sophisticated IDEs. You write that it would be nice to have an FP IDE so it could give you better feedback (or were you talking about an existing FP IDE). These guys built the live IDE (even better than types for direct feedback) in a fraction of the time. Does OPAL still compile to C? Does it still use Tk? Think about Ruby, Python, etc. I could go on (the VPRI stuff is also amazing), but I think you get the idea: it seems that not only can you be a productive member of society without FP, it sure looks like people can be a lot more productive without FP than with it. Java is not really a good example of anything. Certainly not of an OOPL: "Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." "If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture." — Alan Kay (who coined the term "object oriented") I don't quite get why you see LISP as an example for the power of FP, it is a multi-paradigm language with some functional elements, and most of its power comes, AFAIK, from its meta-system. And HOFs like map or fold have been in other languages since the dawn of time, they're certainly in Smalltalk. In terms of rhetoric, Peter Pepper might seem like an outlier, but as far as I can tell he is not. You can see it in this very thread: if you don't buy the self-evident awesomeness, it must be because "you didn't understand" and "refuse to understand", it cannot possibly be because you legitimately have a different point of view. Another example. I watched the following talk by Simon Peyton Jones on data parallel Haskell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8 Interesting stuff. But he has to go and say it: "this is only possible in a pure FP language like Haskell". Hand raised in the auditorium. "Actually, this sort of thing is pretty common in the HPC community, in FORTRAN [under some specific name]". And of course he can't just shut up and read up on things he obviously doesn't know about, he has to retort: "well, that means that it is nothing but a variant of Haskell at this point". Ouch! And finally, at the end of the talk he gives some numbers. It turns out that this amazing thing that's only possible in Haskell needs 6 cores to match the performance of a single core C program. 6:1. That's absolutely pathetic, especially when compared to what the HPC FORTRAN guys are doing. So maybe he shouldn't be lecturing them, they know this stuff a lot better then he does. Now don't get me wrong, the talk was interesting and thought provoking, but the mismatch between grandness of the rhetoric and the paucity of the results was its usual epically proportioned self.

by DasIch 12y ago

mpweiher 12y ago

Your make some good points, but I don't quite buy them. Turbo Pascal for example was written by a single guy, Anders Hejlsberg, in about 2 years for several platforms in assembly language, and included an integrated (though primitive) text editor/IDE. Smalltalk was taken from ST-72 to ST-80 in 8 years, with small teams that also had to invent/implement complete VMs, operating systems, bitmap graphics engines, GUI framework(s) and sophisticated IDEs. You write that it would be nice to have an FP IDE so it could give you better feedback (or were you talking about an existing FP IDE). These guys built the live IDE (even better than types for direct feedback) in a fraction of the time. Does OPAL still compile to C? Does it still use Tk? Think about Ruby, Python, etc. I could go on (the VPRI stuff is also amazing), but I think you get the idea: it seems that not only can you be a productive member of society without FP, it sure looks like people can be a lot more productive without FP than with it. Java is not really a good example of anything. Certainly not of an OOPL: "Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." "If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture." — Alan Kay (who coined the term "object oriented") I don't quite get why you see LISP as an example for the power of FP, it is a multi-paradigm language with some functional elements, and most of its power comes, AFAIK, from its meta-system. And HOFs like map or fold have been in other languages since the dawn of time, they're certainly in Smalltalk. In terms of rhetoric, Peter Pepper might seem like an outlier, but as far as I can tell he is not. You can see it in this very thread: if you don't buy the self-evident awesomeness, it must be because "you didn't understand" and "refuse to understand", it cannot possibly be because you legitimately have a different point of view. Another example. I watched the following talk by Simon Peyton Jones on data parallel Haskell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWSZ4c9yqW8 Interesting stuff. But he has to go and say it: "this is only possible in a pure FP language like Haskell". Hand raised in the auditorium. "Actually, this sort of thing is pretty common in the HPC community, in FORTRAN [under some specific name]". And of course he can't just shut up and read up on things he obviously doesn't know about, he has to retort: "well, that means that it is nothing but a variant of Haskell at this point". Ouch! And finally, at the end of the talk he gives some numbers. It turns out that this amazing thing that's only possible in Haskell needs 6 cores to match the performance of a single core C program. 6:1. That's absolutely pathetic, especially when compared to what the HPC FORTRAN guys are doing. So maybe he shouldn't be lecturing them, they know this stuff a lot better then he does. Now don't get me wrong, the talk was interesting and thought provoking, but the mismatch between grandness of the rhetoric and the paucity of the results was its usual epically proportioned self.