"Programming languages are living phenomena: They're born, the lucky ones that don't die in infancy live sometimes long, fruitful lives, and then inevitably enter a period of decline. Unlike real life, the decline can last many, many years as the presence of large legacy codebases means practiced hands must tend the code for decades. The more popular the language once was, the longer this period of decline will be."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-04-23
I started programming in 1975 with BASIC and COMAL and then later Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL and assembly language at university. On the third year of university, I was taught LISP and was immediately sold. I have also used C, Java, Scheme, ML, Haskell and a dozen less known languages. I tend to use mainly Standard ML. Though it is not purely functional and rather less advanced than Haskell, I like its simplicity: I find that Haskell has evolved to a testbench for weird language and type features so people can write extremely generic programs that you need a PhD to understand.
Standard ML is, however, rather dated. Some attempts at revising it has been made, but they have, IMO, failed mainly by trying to add too many new features to the language. Then there are what I would call misguided derivatives (O'Caml and F#) that add object-oriented features to the language. I would rather see a minimal update that solves some of the more pressing problems (such as lack of Unicode support) and a more modern standard library. And parallelism, of course.
Member since:2005-07-29
Member since:2005-07-08
The functional programming is going to be just another tool of multi-paradigm programming languages, I think.
From my enterprise experience I think functional programming has more chances of success by being integrated into mainstream languages (C#, Scala, ...) as pure functional only.
People finally discovered that single paradigm languages are not a good idea.
Member since:2006-11-28
I disagree. Maintaining a clear, precise focus is a Very Good Thing (see: Coupling and Cohesion 101). You never see a joiner using the same tool to do everything from slice wood to turn screws to drive nails to apply varnish. There's a reason for that.
I think the real problem is developers not being able to hop quickly and effortlessly between different languages within a project. That may be partly down to bridging and tools not being good enough to allow seamless mixing and matching. But I suspect the biggest barrier is developers themselves lacking the mental agility to switch between languages and idioms. That, compounded by a self-indulgent fondness for inventing complex solutions using tools they already know rather than seeking out simple solutions involving tools they don't. The modern trend for Computer Science courses to silently retool as Software Engineering, and from there to lowest-common-denominator Java diploma mills, probably doesn't help either; but that's another debate.
Member since:2008-08-19
Agreed. Over the years, I've found very little value in purely-functional languages - but I find a *lot* of value in having functional elements within more traditional procedural or OO languages.
Member since:2011-10-10
I would disagree here. The problem is that it only takes one mutable piece of data or one function with a side effect to ruin an entire call chain. Mixing and matching pure FP with anything else renders your code non-pure and thus you may as well not have written in an FP style at all.
Less seriously, it forces users to think multiple ways. I saw many java developers complain vehemently about the upcoming lambdas in Java 8. So one developer might write code in an OO style, and another in an FP style, and now everybody has to learn both ways of doing it.
Member since:2006-01-24
Carmack had a (imo) interesting blog post on functional programming from a C++ perspective:
http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-...
Member since:2006-07-04
I love functional programming.
But imperative programming more matches the way that people actually think. People think in concrete, step-by-step terms: I get out of bed, I take a shower, I brush my teeh, I comb my hair, I get dressed, I eat breakfast, I leave the house, I go to work, I park my car, I walk into the office, I etc, etc, etc. In order to achieve a particular goal, people do each step in a particular order.
Functional (and logic) programming, is more atuned to abstract/mathematical thinking (and the more declarative the programming is, the more it becomes like math). Most people are not adept at that.
Member since:2009-06-30
If that was how OO programs are written the world would be better. Most programs (and toolkits) look more like this:
"[You,] get out of bed! Take shower! Brush teeth! Comb your hair!"
or even:
"take a comb, raise your hand, do {stroke your hair} until (enough)".
Calling other object's "doSomething" or "setSomething" methods is modern equivalent of calling "goto". A single setter may look innocent but try to sequence a number of them and you will have to deal with all the complexity (structure, sequencing, side effects) that leaked out from the object. That's because the control is no longer inside the object but in a caller of the method.
The third and final WWDC product I want to talk about is - of course - OS X 10.9 Mavericks. While iOS 7 was clearly the focus of this year's WWDC, its venerable desktop counterpart certainly wasn't left behind. Apple announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the first OS X release not to carry the name of a big cat.
We already talked about iOS 7 yesterday (after a night of sleep, it's only looking worse and worse - look at this, for Fiona's sake!), so now it's time to talk about the downright stunning and belly flutters-inducing new Mac Pro. As former owner and huge, huge, huge fan of the PowerMac G4 Cube - I haven't been this excited about an Apple product since, well, I would say the iMac G4. This is the Apple I used to love.
Apple held its big keynote event thing at WWDC earlier this evening, but since I was away with friends I've had to read up on it later in the evening. The company announced iOS 7, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and they gave a preview of the new Mac Pro. Especially the Mac Pro impressed me, and while iOS 7's new Holo/Metro-inspired theme looks messy and garish to me, I do commend Apple for finally breaking the mold. This news item will focus on iOS 7 - I'll dive into the Mac Pro and OS X 10.9 tomorrow (it's late here now).
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?This story is getting bigger and bigger. Even though most Americans probably already knew, it is now official: the United States government, through its National Security Agency, is collecting the communications and data of all American citizens, and of non-Americans using American services, through a wide collaboration with the large companies in technology, like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on. Interestingly enough, the NSA itself, as well as the US government, have repeatedly and firmly denied this massive spying on Americans and non-Americans took place at all.Ah, patents - the never-ending scourge of the technology industry. Whether wielded by companies who don't actually make any products, or large corporations who abuse them because they can't compete in the market place or because they're simply jerks, they do the industry a huge disservice and are simply plain dangerous. According to The Wall Street Journal (circumvention link), president Obama is about to take several executive actions to address patent trolls - which may seem like a good idea, but I am very worried that all this will do is strengthen the positions of notorious patent system abusers such as Apple and Microsoft.
With version 13.05, the developers of the Genode OS Framework take measures to ensure that Genode continues to scale well with a growing number of users and the steadily broadening platform coverage. Further highlights are the improved SoC support for Exynos 5, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi, i.MX, and new components for realizing headless systems.At the D11 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook once again took the stage to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. While most of the interview can be replicated by picking and reading 10 random Apple fanblog stories - there were still a number of very interesting things that warrant some closer scrutiny.
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
Member since:
2011-10-10
I do hope that functional programming languages undergoes a renaissance. However, in my opinion, imperative style languages have made it harder for people to think that way if they have been coding in an imperative style for too long. The thought process requires a radical shift which takes time. For me, it became relatively easy to pick up a new OO or imperative style language. However, it took me several months of wracking my brain to even begin to program in a functional style.
immutable vs. mutable data
recursion vs. iteration
closures vs. objects
method dispatch vs. polymorphism
pattern matching vs. switches
composition of functions vs. aggregation of objects
Macros vs. DSLs
Continuations vs. Exceptions/goto/setjmp
But once you do figure out, it just becomes more elegant. I don't know how software is going to get faster with multi-cores unless people switch to functional languages. Lock-based concurrency is just really hard to get right.
If you don't believe me, read Bartosz Milewski's post on why he switched to FP (and if you don't know who Bartosz is, just google him).
http://fpcomplete.com/the-downfall-of-imperative-programming/
My own dabble with functional languages has been mostly clojure and scheme based. Next on my list to learn is haskell. I tried Scala and didn't like it much (personal choice, it reminded me of perl's TIMTOWTDI and it wasn't really all that functional to which Odersky himself agreed). Clojure is nice, and it's way more readable than lisp/schemes since it also has [] for vectors and {} for maps. That little change makes clojure way more readable. That being said, being hosted on the JVM sucks for system programming. So that's why I've been learning scheme and next on my list is haskell.