Re: [Haskell-cafe] A rant against the blurb on the Haskell front page

On 16/10/2010 09:02 AM, Stephen Tetley wrote:

On 16 October 2010 08:09, Colin Paul Adams wrote:

...

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.

By that rationale, I should never have chosen Haskell. (I'm really glad I did though...)

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.

I've always thought "function-oriented programming" (by analogy to "object-oriented programming") to be a far more illunimating term. But of course, as son as you do that, anybody who knows about "functional programming" will wonder if "function-oriented programming" is a different animal somehow... It seems that for good or ill, we're stuck with the existing terminology.