» Wednesday, 28 April A.D. 2010
functional language proponents
Seen on an LtU thread:
Actually, I think one of the reasons FP proponents are more convinced of the superiority of functional programming than is necessarily warranted is due to their high degree of applicability to writing compilers, where almost all I/O is input to a function at one end and output at the other end, where the input and output are defined in specifications, where there is an unambiguously correct mapping from source to target, where the data is inherently tree structured, where the structure of the computation involves recursive pattern matching and transformation, where there is virtually no dynamic code loading necessary, etc. It's a match made in heaven; and if all you do is geek on languages and compilers - especially in an academic context - of course it's self-evident that functional programming is superior to everything else.
How true, how true.
posted by Nate @ 3:55PM