Re: F# fsharp

I'm making my closing remarks in this thread now.  Vacation mode imminent.

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 1:59 AM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Jun 11, 2010, at 12:14 AM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> So here's the high-level assertion...

This is painfully obvious to anyone who has come from a non-FP
paradigm and tried to wrap their head around pure FP.  In the real
world, state is useful, not something to make vampire cross-fingers
at, the way Haskell academics do.  It's why OCaml was productized at
MS and not Haskell; OCaml is a multi-paradigm, non-pure FP language.

>> It has few users and consequent low implementation quality,
>> for basic support issues like getting the compiler working, finding
>> well maintained libraries, etc.
>
> ... and we're back to the circular argument that the tool is a poor choice because nobody uses.  (Nobody uses it, because it's a poor choice, wash, rinse, repeat.)
>
> This is an argument from *practicality* and perfectly valid when making real choices for real tools in the real world, but it says nothing fundamental about the tool itself.

Sure it does.  It says that the language community surrounding the
tool is impractical, which begats more impracticality, and hence fewer
users.  The dirty little secret of open source is it's not about the
code, it's about the people.

> WHY do "pure" functional programming languages suffer this fate?  Is it that they are badly suited to real-world problems,

hey you got it in 1

> If the former, then perhaps FP isn't worth discussing at all.

perhaps *pure* FP isn't worth discussing at all.

> I'm unconvinced, for example, that F# has a sufficiently low learning curve to escape the ghetto of companies whose decision-making process centers around "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" -- even with first-class support for Mono.  While the imprimatur of the Microsoft branding may force programmers to swallow the bitter pill of learning something considerably foreign to what they are used to, that's far less useful than if it was so interesting that people who aren't saddled with C++ (or even C#) coveted it.

We'll need a few years for F# early adopters to beat the pants off of
companies that don't get with the program.  Then the migration path
will become clear.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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