He can't take it very far. The whole point is to keep the entire lesson in the space the audience regards as relevant. What you know to be relevant for his audience isn't the same as what his audience knows to be relevant. We are emphatically not the audience for this piece. Notice how he emphasizes the commercial value. My guess is that most of the people who participate on this list are in some sort of research center, where the value of academic research is a given. On Aug 2, 2006, at 12:32 PM, Jared Updike wrote:
I don't think this commentary is really fair. It's also insular and bad for the reputation of the Haskell community. There are enough barriers to exploring FP and Haskell already. The purpose of the article was to encourage people to start taking baby steps toward FP, not to demonstrate a deep mastery of the subject.
I feel (maybe others agree) delighted that someone so widely read begins to extoll the virtues of functional programming. I also feel (maybe others also agree) disappointed that this, and other such articles, fail to take the subject far enough, really showing what better programming languages can do. I supposed I should be happy; the long road to FP has to start somewhere, hopefully others will start down that road sooner rather than later.
Jared.
Reilly Hayes rfh@reillyhayes.com