On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
Henning Thielemann writes:
jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
Henning Thielemann writes:
?? Mathematica and MatLab are just the opposite of statically safe programming.
Is this a religious statement, quite popular in our Church of Functionalism, or you mean something concrete by that, and if yes, then what?
I meant that these languages, which are the main products of Wolfram and MathWorks, respectively, are untyped or at least dynamically typed, and thus are certainly not the appropriate tools for reliable development and maintenance. However, I see that Jon Harrop claimed statical type safety only for OCaml and Haskell, and functional design and high productivity for Mathematica and MatLab et.al.
Well, Henning, it is quite a statement: "certainly not the appropriate tools for reliable development and maintenance". Tell that to those legions of people who made dozens of thousands of programs in Lisp (or Scheme), in Smalltalk, etc. And now in Erlang...
I think there is a difference between 'many people have done it this way' and 'it was an appropriate choice to do so'.