Re: F# fsharp

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Jun 10, 2010, at 10:45 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 11:37 PM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby all share the characteristic of being the product of a handful of individuals that became sufficiently widely used through purely 'organic' growth that they are now taken seriously at many large companies
>>
>> nitpicks:
>> - Google hired Guido
>> - nobody takes Perl 6 seriously
>
> They hired Guido AFTER Python had already become widely used.

But the marketing of Python to corporations under Guido and the PSF
was a joke.  Once Guido was in Google's employ, "adult things" were
made to happen with Python.  Things that open source volunteers tried
to get to happen earlier, but were blocked.  My point is, it took
corporate backing to get Python to its next stage of growth and
mainstream acceptance.

> And Perl falling flat on its face does not change the fact that for a good long time, Perl 5 was commercially significant (and still sees wide usage today).

It says that there are evolutionary dead ends in open source.  Also,
that a "better language" (Ruby) can pick up where a stagnating
technology left off.

>> Haskell has been out in open source land just as long as the more
>> successful things you mention, and almost nobody has wanted Haskell.
>
> To be precise:
> Perl - 1987
> Haskell - 1990
> Ruby, PHP - 1995
>
> I'm fairly certain there isn't One True Timeline for wide adoption of a tool.

I suppose you're waiting for the Second Coming Of Lisp?  ;-)

> It wasn't until Rails came along that people 'noticed' that Ruby was actually quite well suited to 'the web'.

We could all do with another Next Big Thing on the order of the
dot.com boom.  Would be nice for all programmers to be treated like
gods and rock stars again.

> Ruby did not need to change to be better for 'the web', it just needed to overcome peoples tendency to be dismissive of the unfamiliar and to utterly lack any imagination/foresight/etc.

On the other hand, techies are poor marketers and generally can't rise
to the challenge.  Take the Lisp community, for instance.  It was
crippled by the AI winter of the 1980s, suffering guilt by
association.  But despite all the intervening time, the Lisp community
has never recovered.  The damage done to the Lisp brand identity is
seemingly permanent.  Sure, newer generations have shown a somewhat
rekindled interest in Lisp, but other programming languages have
advanced so much meanwhile, that Lisp doesn't look as radical as it
once did.  Rather, in another 10 years, mainstream programming
languages will have finished co-opting anything of value in Lisp.

>> The clear explanation is there were easy gains to be made in open
>> source Unix clones, Unix admin tools, and web apps.  Pretty much all
>> of the "O'Reilly languages" grew because of the web.  Haskell worried
>> about academic stuff, and consequently nobody cared.
>
> Or perhaps people who aren't using Haskell have made deep assumptions about how it must be grossly unsuited to anything but 'academia' and have thus chosen to ignore it.
>
> You've made a bunch of statements hand-waving Haskell away with the slander of 'academia', but have not once pointed to a specific behavior/feature (or lack thereof) that makes it unsuitable for real world use -- other than the fact that it ISN'T being used widely.

Sure I have, but you'd have to read back a few posts.  "Pure"
functional programming is anathema to getting things done in the real
world.  It has few users and consequent low implementation quality,
for basic support issues like getting the compiler working, finding
well maintained libraries, etc.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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