On 16 October 2010 08:09, Colin Paul Adams
And "purely functional programming language"?
If they mean anything to many people, it's that the language works (i.e. functions). What language wouldn't work?
I think Ben has a strong point here.
If a "functional language" doesn't mean anything significant then Haskell probably isn't the language you should be choosing. In the UK some time before Haskell, I believe there was some effort to re-brand "functional programming" to "applicative programming" to make a distinction with functional - "actually works!" - and (first order-) functions in C or Pascal that were like procedures but returned a result. This was before my time, but I'm sure I saw evidence in reports at my old university library for grant proposals / research awards to put applicative programming on parallel machines. Caveat - my university didn't do any research on this but it did have government reports of computer matters stored amongst the programming books, one obviously with a title "functional" or "applicative" enough to catch my interest. On the main topic - I think the blurb is fine. If Python and Ruby want to do proselytization and value judgements please leave them to it. Best wishes Stephen