Re: Hello - and where to begin?

On 23/01/2008, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[email protected]> wrote:
> Jason Kemp wrote:
> > Are there any other computer languages that arouse such philosophical
> > discourse and soul searching?

> Scheme.

The whole Lisp family, in fact.

And Haskell as well, to an extent, as the most well-developed current
embodiment of pure functional programming - it turns out that more and
more of what we assume to be low level facilities to be abstracted
away can be simulated by a purely functional machine. (And arrows are
very reminiscent of stack operations.)

I remember talking to some professor in Manchester University, when I
went there for an interview in 1991, about whether Forth could be
treated as a functional language; I said yes, because of the ease with
which functions can be composed, but he raised the question of
laziness...

The thing that all of these beasts have in common is that they blur
the distinction between compile time and runtime, in both phase and
environment. Even if Haskell is still a bit stuck in batch-mode
thinking, and hasn't quite realised that's what it's doing... but it's
hard to see where else the combination of strict typing and lazy
evaluation is going; the parts of a program that the type system can
express is evaluated as early as possible (ie. at compile time), and
the rest isn't evaluated until it absolutely has to be.

Regards
Gwenhwyfaer