Re: F# fsharp

On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
> On May 29, 2010, at 12:20 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately, um, in the meantime Java and C# are pretty dumbed down
>> languages.  I've never been interested, and they've never become
>> interesting.  Partly because I just don't care about the web, or about
>> mobile devices.  The former, because of my 3D ASM biases, has always
>> been too slow.  The latter, have screens that are too tiny.  They're
>> both an opportunity to do all the games that have been done to death
>> forever.
>
> Calling them "dumbed down" is a misnomer.  They attempt to automate away tasks that programmers overall have consistently demonstrated difficulty in properly managing -- such as memory management.

Well, having canonical get and set members seemed like a reasonable
idea in C#.  I don't object to garbage collection so much anymore.  I
see Java and C# as offering very little, paradigmatically, above and
beyond what C++ offers for OO though.  That's what I mean by "dumbed
down."  These aren't languages for hackers / programmer gods who want
to implement amazing new things from scratch, i.e. the Lisp of legend.
 These are languages for enforcing corporate stability at the broad
scale.

>> commercially viable functional programming language.  F# potentially
>> has dollar signs written on it, whereas previously everything was just
>> R&D academic stuff, with a few narrow exceptions in some corners of
>> the computer industry.  It's much easier to justify a learning curve
>> now, and I'd rather put it into new stuff (FP) than old stuff (C++).
>
> That's a bit of a myopic view.  Ruby has gained significant traction in the web world -- hardly "R&D academic stuff".

Ruby is not dumbed down.  My main objection to Ruby is it's so slow.
Worse than Python slow.  Also its historical center is Ruby on Rails,
and as I said, I don't care about the web.

> Scala and Clojure also seem to be making inroads.

When comparing dollar signs, I'll take MS's support of F# over such
"inroads."  I don't see many people getting paid big bucks to code in
Scala or Clojure any time soon.

 > While F# may be the first viable 'functional' language for the
*game industry*, that is a very different thing.

Actually I don't restrict my dollar signs to the game industry, or
even expect it.  Historically, the most FP dollar signs have been in
finance, and possibly telco with Erlang.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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