Jon Harrop wrote:
However, both F# and Scala have the potential to dwarf all of these languages in the not-so-distant future. I believe F# will do so in 2008 but Scala will take 2-3 years because they have far fewer resources to develop essential tools like working IDE plug-ins.
I agree on that. IMHO, having looked at both F# and Scala, these seem like the most pragmatic languages, adding functional programming on top of "industry proven" imperative/OO technologies. Furthermore, if F# really becomes an officially supported Microsoft product as promised, this will indeed have the potential of rapidly becoming popular. It is also possible that C# will get more and more functional features as it is currently doing, and hence either become a monster or remain very popular in the industry... And what do you think about Sun's Fortress? I kind of liked that language a lot too, but it was way too early to use it. What I like about Haskell is that the language progresses faster than I can learn it ;-) (which might be one of the reasons people don't like it, but hey, it's a *research* language, it must advance!) Andrew Coppin wrote:
[I actually heard a number of people tell me that learning LISP would change my life forever because LISP has something called "macros". I tried to learn it, and disliked it greatly. It's too messy. And what the heck is "cdr" ment to mean anyway? To me, LISP doesn't even seem all that different from normal languages (modulo weird syntax). Now
Ah well, CDR and CAR are historic terms, something to do with the first LISP hardware (Content of Data / Address Register). Wikipedia tells you all about it. Or watch the MIT videos about SICP (structure and interpretation of computer programs), they are fun too.
Actually "Lambda" is just as abstract no? It also has historic meaning.
Haskell... that's FUN! Yes, it's fun, but again, it would be much more fun to me if it had a good IDE with integrated refactoring, good completion, on the fly type inference, etc... But that of course is not of great research interest, so I should not have brought that up again ;-)
Peter