Real Programming in Functional Languages (1982) [pdf]

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/other-authors/morris-real-programming.pdf

by luu • 11 years ago

49 10 11 years ago

research.microsoft.com

antics• 11 years ago

My favorite part about this is the introduction, where the authors relate functional programming to Haiku and Karate. Haiku and Karate are both intricate, beautiful, highly regimented arts. But only one is useful in a bar fight, and the people who are its victims don't know about the craft, or why it's effective.

So, the paper asks: which is functional programming? Haiku or Karate?

(EDIT: And, more personal note: Dan, thanks for posting. :) I assume since you posted this later, you got it from my Twitter, in which case you should also look at the Butler Lampson/Erik Meijer talk that I heard it from, and which I've been trying to get you to watch: https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/E2E-Erik-Meijer-a...)

platz• 11 years ago

Some excepts from the Conclusions section are fairly amusing:

"One way to compromise between functional and imperative programming is recognize that every language has a functional subset, usually associated with the set of expressions in the language. However, it is rarely useful to take advantage of the functional subset via clever evaluation or compilation strategies because expressions in that subset usually represent very small intervals of computation or leave the functional subset via calls on functions with side effects"

"Functional languages as a minority doctrine in the field of programming languages bear a certain resemblance to socialism in its relation to conventional, capitalist economic doctrine. Their proponents are often brilliant intellectuals perceived to be radical and rather unrealistic by the mainstream, but little-by-little changes are made in the conventional languages and economies to incorporate features of the radical proposals. Of course this never satisfies the radicals, but it represents progress of a sort."

"A little appreciated role of functional programming, goto-less programming, and other stylish forms of programming is an indicator of a programmer's morale. When one comes across a program with a rat's nest of gotos, or large amounts of pointer arithmetic one says to himself, "This programmer was barely able to solve the problem he was working on. If he had the intellectual problem well under control, then he should have devoted some of his brainpower to making it look pretty according to generally accepted standards, e.g. eliminating gotos."

jpgauthier• 11 years ago

The second quote is so true. I never thought of it that way!

hcarvalhoalves• 11 years ago

This quote is so misleading.

Since when functional programming is "radical"? It's the essence of computing.

What we're seeing are other languages going back to the basics, after a detour in the "imperative is easy to learn" and "OO is reusable" lands.

peter303• 11 years ago

When I went to college John Bachus, the inventor of FORTRAN was a computer science God. And when he becameba functional programming evangelist, we politely listened.

I did not becomeva convert until Scala came along as a way to mange large core clusters.

Real Programming in Functional Languages (1982) [pdf]

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