On 12/12/06, Kaveh Shahbazian
So you still want to pay your developers for checking "NULL" values, correctness of "INTERFACES", writing "IF ELSE" and "SELECT CASE"s full of side effect and junks (Something that can be simply implemented by "Pattern Matching"), continuing OO world that has not even a accurate calculus for describing things (and came from industrial engineering), code that may crash through exceptions and very stupid-complex execution paths, checking array out-of rang things, handling and passing and dereferencing pointers correctly...............OOOOH! Just calculate that how % of developer's time is being consumed by this stupid tasks? You know; this will be a big-bang for commercials! (If their stupid consultants can understand).
Yes. It's always hard to convince people that they've been doing something the wrong way, though. "People" includes smart academic types, sometimes, too. I think you're absolutely right, but if you have ideas for what to say in those commercials, you can post them here :-) And of course it's not quite as simple as "people have been doing it the wrong way", because sometimes there are reasons even for the kinds of code that look the most horrible on the surface. Functional programming people have a reputation for arrogance -- whether that impression is fair or not and whether that arrogance is merited or not, the impression exists, and some people find it a turn-off. Avoid being the overenthusiastic convert.
I am a usual developer, not smart and academic as you, and not as stupid ones to pretend to know something better than all. Even this kind of programming still is very hard for me. I am still struggling with monads and monad transformers! So I am choosing the hard path - even very hard one. Why? Because I am sure every mean developer like me can be productive in functional programming in 6 to 12 months. And imagine that huge bunch of stupid things that we are handling everyday : Just wast of life and money without any joy and honor. This is my vision : FIVE YEARS ...
I hope so! And I think if you got to know at least *some* of the smart and academic types, you would find that they struggle sometimes too. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "What is research but a blind date with knowledge?" -- Will Henry