Re: [Haskell-cafe] Game of life in haskell.

On Tuesday 02 February 2010 18:44:25 David Leimbach wrote:

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Jon Harrop wrote:

...

I meant the scalability and speed. An imperative solution should be simpler, more scalable and faster than any purely functional solution.

That's a pretty strange comment. Why do you think an imperative solution is simpler, faster and more scalable?

Mutation can avoid lots of unnecessary allocations and indirections with minimal risk of error in this case.

If functional programming can't provide any one of those, it's not worth anything,

I doubt programming paradigms live or die according to whether or not they can implement Conway's Game of Life simply and efficiently.

and based on the membership in this list, the interest in it these days, and the fact that I've seen many occasions where functional programming lends itself to a faster implementation (in terms of time to implement and test) that's actually readable sooner than a lot of imperative approaches...

Of Conway's Game of Life? -- Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e