Hello Ralf, Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 1:27:39 PM, you wrote:

Read a sentence like this "If your programming language requires you to use functors, you're not getting all the benefits of a modern programming environment. See if you can get some of your money back."

in the article "history of Haskell" (announced by SPJ here) it was one brilliant phrase, what is 100% true for me - "Haskell jobs attracts most matured programmers". apart from Haskell, i almost don't know any language which is adequate to mindlevel of experienced programmer and allow me to think about functionality, about algorithms as opposite to implementation details and low-level code. and in particular, i hate repeating the same code more than one time and therefore i don't rate highly languages that don't allow me to use (and define) functors (it is not fair, but afair Joel is the man which worked in MS as programmer and as programmer's manager? i once reading his article which was started with statement "our (startup) firm requires the best programmer's talents" and in the middle he was written several examples of code which "best programmers" should be able to write, including such "complex" tasks as reversing linked list :) ) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

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. Joel's blog is read by a wide range of technology people, most of whom have a principally OO background. Javascript was the obvious choice (it's more widely used than any other language with lambda nature). The word Functor is heavily overloaded in computer science. His use of the word is clearly a reference to the Functor Design Pattern and was appropriate for his readership. Sure, it's a long distance from the meaning of the word in category theory, but who really cares? I actually think that the appropriate paper to cite would be "Lambda: The Ultimate Imperative" by Guy Steele in 1976. It doesn't matter how old the academic literature is. If the lessons from the literature are not in widespread use, then it isn't a bad thing to try to popularize them. What he did at MS as a developer & development manager arguably made them a boatload of money. His own company seems to do quite well. All of this gives him high quality commercial credentials. An article in his blog can do a great deal to help FP (lazy or strict) be more widely appreciated. Reilly H. On Aug 2, 2006, at 11:14 AM, Jared Updike wrote:

So basically he rediscovered Why FP Matters (http://www.math.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html) ~15-20 years after the fact, but neglected to point out the interesting fact that one can write map in terms of reduce (i.e. foldr) (obviously he didn't read the paper) and ignored the benefits of laziness. Also, if your programming language has this ability and it's so great, why is this not idiomatic? (i.e. people using for loops all over the place in JavaScript).

(Sorry, couldn't find a place to comment on Joel's blog). Jared.

On 8/2/06, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

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From the excellent programming blog "Joel on software", a very good text if you need to convince Java or C programmers that functional programming is a A Good Thing.

Probably all the readers of this list will find it brings nothing new (that's perfectly right) but it is oriented towards ordinary programmers :-)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- http://www.updike.org/~jared/ reverse ")-:" _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

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:

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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

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 11:14:30AM -0700, Jared Updike wrote a message of 32 lines which said:

(Sorry, couldn't find a place to comment on Joel's blog).

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel And I agree with Reilly Hayes: as I said in my first message, Joel tried to introduce ordinary programmers (not computer-science teachers) to functional programming. Such propaganda work is extremely useful and experts in monads or type inference may not be the best people to do so.