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From: aaron@vienna.njit.edu (Aaron Watters)
Subject: Re: Which first-course languages? (was: What schools use Eiffel (was: No top schools use Ada)) ?
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Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 17:07:37 GMT
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In article <dewar.798464806@gnat> dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
>The difficulty with any aggressively pure functional language is that,
>although you can model anything, you are doing just that in many cases,
>modeling, instead of writing things in a direct fashion. I tend to think
>that the world comes with state, and that procedural notions with state
>(I use the word procedural in a broad meaning, as opposed to functional,
>certainly embracing object oriented approaches, including even "pure"
>object oriented approaches) are ultimately more natural.

More natural for what?  There are lots of problems where the
functional approach is the simplist and best way to go.  I would
argue that most of those problems are theoretical in nature and
have little to do with the programmer grunts over in the Manhattan
robber baron trading houses who have to code up a flashy gui for
their petulant traders by yesterday -- for them the OO way of thinking
is probably the easiest.  There will always be a community that uses
functional languages and techniques, however, elsewhere.

>But that's the big argument -- so far functional languages have not lit
>a real fire, even though they have been around for a long time. Perhaps
>the enthusiasm for object oriented approaches spells their doom, we will
>see!

I view functional languages like constructivist mathematics -- the
research program will never completely win over the engineers in the
trenches who will never get upset about using the odd side effect --
just like no structural engineer worries too much about uncountability
-- but the line of enquiry certainly produced some interesting results
that will be used and enjoyed forever, even if object oriented
languages (with ghastly looking denotational semantics) take the lions
share.  I'd wager you'll see these languages adopting some functional
features, and in fact, it's happened.		-a.
