Hi gladstein@gladstein.com wrote:
As a working engineer, one of my greatest frustrations is my inability to use Haskell in the workplace. The unfortunate fact is that my media industry clients use mostly Windows, some Macs, and no linux except for servers. The core system works everywhere, but many contributed libraries don't. GUIs are the big showstopper.
One of the reasons Java won out over Common Lisp is that it had huge libraries. Franz's libraries were superb but few in number. One diehard Lisp user converted his lab to Java because "Java gives you everything you want, for free."
That languages are distinct from their libraries escapes a lot of people; they see each language as a package. I met a COBOL programmer recently (I'm not making this up) that was looking into Java. He didn't see how people could use it, he said, because it had "thousands of commands".
Looking at Wikipedia I can see that COBOL 2002[1] got user defined functions, but prior it was impossible to define your own functions. You could define sub-rutines (semantically similar to jsr/gosub in assembler/basic), but not functions that could be used like the build-in (intrinsic in COBOL speak) functions. Most COBOL programmers properly still do not use user-defined functions. So from their perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to see functions as part of the language. My point is, that it is properly true that most COBOL programmers sees functions as part of the language. But you cannot generalize from COBOL programmers to programmers in say Java, in this particular case.
I'll stop whining now.
Greetings, Mads Lindstrøm [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2002_and_object-oriented_COBOL