From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,442a61fa28886220 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-09-18 13:26:20 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.stueberl.de!newspeer1-gui.server.ntli.net!ntli.net!newsfep4-glfd.server.ntli.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: chris User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030903 Thunderbird/0.2 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada for a programming newb. References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:30:45 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.98.236.164 X-Complaints-To: abuse@ntlworld.com X-Trace: newsfep4-glfd.server.ntli.net 1063916779 81.98.236.164 (Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:26:19 BST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 21:26:19 BST Organization: ntl Cablemodem News Service Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:42665 Date: 2003-09-18T21:30:45+01:00 List-Id: Luke A. Guest wrote: > > Forget about about functional/logic programming languages, it's generally > really strange people who *get* these. They're too odd - i.e. > mathematical/formal, which isn't as natural as "normal" programming > languages. I disagree. It is true that most functional languages are stuck in an academic hole, largely because academics get carried away with how nice Factorial looks or the aesthetics of the typing system (Scream "WTF else can you do with it?" get's tales of how it elegantly expresses the generation of Fibonacci numbers... wow! ;) ). That's a shame, there are a few functional languages out there that could be used for building complex applications, it's just no one bothers writing real apps in them. No one bothers writing real apps in them because there are no libraries aimed at real apps. No one develops libraries aimed at real apps because they don't develop real apps... Erlang is a very good functional language, which has a distributed programming model easier to use than Adas'. If it had gui libraries I'd probably use it a lot more than Ada, but they're all old and people haven't updated them. Erlang is used a lot for other things though, especially in the communications sector (where it was born, not some Academic Factorially Challenged research project). Chris