Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Fri 19th Sep 2008 21:00 UTC, submitted by Ward D
Computerworld chats to Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell. Peyton-Jones speaks in depth about his desire to 'do one thing well',
as well as interest in lazy functional programming languages and their place in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters.
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Member since:
2005-06-30
The book will be extremely thick if that is the case. Not to mention the amount of advertisements they would add (haha, stupid computer world).
Anyway, you should be talking about Haskell. It nearly gave me a mind-implosion the first time I saw it. The idea of clean calls is so captivating I couldn't stop reading it.
However, by simply sticking to purity they have made the system really difficult to comprehend at one go. It is no way similar to languages where you can work with subsets, like just a basic part of C. You really will have to expend some effort into understanding the entire idea before working with the language.
On the other hand, that makes the users of the language think of the problem on a much higher level than others. The example in the interview is exceptionally striking as it practically defined a physics-level pure function that is time independent -- just input any value of time and it will work. It is just as elegant as how relativity unified time and space. If iteration is natural, recursion is divine, then this will earn you the direct one-way ticket to heaven!
Not to mention that, seriously, we need programmers to think at a higher level. The mass of programmers out there programming drivers seem to have trouble with practically everything other than issuing pointers. They seem to assume infinite memory space and processing speed... Scary! Putting more effort into programming would do everyone of us much good.