Re: Some exciting new trends in concurrency and software design

[jonathan <johnscpg@googlemail.com>]

On Jun 20, 3:40 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:

> FP *hides* the effective work's complexity behind a mathematical
> facade: you write down a nice formula after days of thinking,
> shouting, explaining, and getting it right. Then, you do *not*
> document your "thought process" in source text.  Instead, you just
> "sign" days of work with a few nice lines of code.  That's quite
> typical of FP, I think, but just less feasible in "imperative"
> languages. We can stare at the short FP algorithm in awe of its
> "mathematical elegance" and start wondering what the heck it is doing
> behind the scenes. Yes, doing, since doing is what matters, even
> when we just want to understand an algorithm.
>
Functional programming doesn't appeal to me, for similar
reasons, but mostly the problem is I'll always need the best
efficiency that languages like Fortran/C/Ada can give me,
and I never want to battle a garbage collector.
What I do find appealing is Harper's defense of static typing
+ modularity.  20 yrs ago someone said to me in passing that
there was this really good new language out called C++.  My
exact words were: I've come to the conclusion that languages
should be strongly typed and modular.  The conversation
came to a full stop. Her eyes widened, and she didn't say
another word to me.  Well, after 20 years OO chauvinism I did get
a kick out of Harper's confident claims and the observation that
"We have for decades struggled with using object-oriented
languages, such as Java or C++, to explain these simple ideas,
and have consistently failed." But he muddies the water by
deprecating OO.  I'm pretty sure you can do all these things
fine in Ada, and without garbage collectors.

J.