Re: The state of functional programming

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:47:40 +0100, (see below) wrote:

> I was at a short talk given by one of the leading FP propagandists.
> He drew an S-curve depicting technological penetration against time, and
> admitted that FP was still at the bottom left, far from lift-off. After 50
> years! (McCarthy's "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their
> computation by machine, Part I" was published in 1960. We still seem to be
> waiting for Part II: "real-world relevance".)

It is an interesting topic actually. There is a never ending struggle for
another computational platform. Any declarative framework is in the end an
attempt to replace our machines with something else. So were RDBMS, the 5GL
project (prolog etc, if anybody still remember that), modeling languages
like UML, and ones like Simulink. FP is very much alike. So far all these
attempts failed. I mean technically, RDMS and modeling tools are
commercially quite successful [*]. It is interesting to see what happens
when the platform indeed changes. The candidates might be quantum,
molecular machines, massively parallel systems.

-------------------
* To the OP, if you want to make FP successful, here is a simple recipe.
Make a tool chain. Name it functional-whatever. Advertise it for C and
Java. Managers like tools. They honestly believe that tools produce
software. I mean literally, you buy the tool X and the project Y is
advanced two weeks ahead. The more expensive the tool is greater is the
advance. Who would buy it otherwise? If you buy many most expensive ones,
you would need no these lazy overpaid guys, the programmers...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de