On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Pierre Weis wrote:
> I completely agree with you on those, somewhat impossible to obtain and
> prove, productivity ratio gains. 1:3 to 1:10 is reasonable.
> 
> However, an interesting ratio seems to be forgotten in the discussion:
> infinity :)
> 
> I mean, I know a lot of problems that could simply not have been
> solved in any other language, and in this casess we observe this
> extreme limit ratio.

Well, this is a simple consequence of us humans having finite brains
(though some hackprogrammers don't believe that ;)

Even if FPLs reduce complexity only slightly, this implies that there
must be previously insoluble problems that become solvable by their
application.

> No flame, please: I know that SML or Haskell could do roughly speaking
> the same as Caml could do for the programmer, I also know that once
> the program has been written and is fairly stable you can rewrite it
> in any other language you want, even C++ or Java, provided you have
> enough time and money. I also do know that there are a lot of
> situations where you do not have enough time and/or money...

Right, as soon as there are constraints (scarce resources), economical
thinking demands more efficient tools (languages).

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl                                             markus@oefai.at
Austrian Research Institute
for Artificial Intelligence                  http://www.oefai.at/~markus
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