Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?

From: Jean-Christophe Filliatre (Jean-Christophe.Filliatre@lri.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 13 2000 - 08:53:21 MET DST

  • Next message: Frank Atanassow: "Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?"

    > more attractive than C++. In ocaml, there are arrays, structures
    > and objects etc, but no such things like pointers in C.

    Wrong. You have references, which are quite better than pointers (they
    are typed, and necessarily initialized)

    > 1. Current functional languages do not have enough library support:

    Please. ocaml has the most wonderful standard library that any other
    language has ever had. Have a look in the reference manual before
    stating such non-sense.

    > 2. Functional languages do not well support the use of dynamic
    > data structures which requires mutable operations for achieving the
    > efficiency;

    Wrong. And you should stop thinking that efficiency means mutable data
    structures. Once again, read Okasaki's book.

    > It is no doubt that functional languages will continue to succeed in
    > eduacation, research, high level specification, formal program
    > verification, fast prototyping, etc. But, it appears to me that, in
    > industry, the second approach might succeed in most cases.

    Your arguments are not the good ones. People in industry do not use
    functional programming for other reasons: because this is not in their
    culture, because they don't know, because they have not been taught
    functional programming. Some of them, like you, think that functional
    programming languages are inefficient, but they are wrong.

    -- 
    Jean-Christophe FILLIATRE
      mailto:Jean-Christophe.Filliatre@lri.fr
      http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr
    



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