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ICFP 2002 Contest Winners Announced

Posted by timothy on from the coffee-bean-laurels-would-be-appropriate dept.

Georgwe Russell writes "The Winners have been announced at the official web site. Looks like OCaml and functional programming have won again, with the 3 member TAPLAS team. There is somewhat of an upset, though. Second place goes to 3-member team Radical TOO, whose entry was written in C! In the lightning round, the virtues of Python as a quick prototyping language were shown in the lightning division's winning entry by the OaSys one-man team. Does the skill of the programmer prevail over the limitations of the language and paradigm used, or is C nearly as good a language as OCaml?"

1 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. methodology differs, and it matters by g4dget · · Score: 2, Redundant
    The proficiency in writing programs means more. Most languages are functionally equivalent,

    Languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Ada, Eiffel, VisualBasic, etc., are indeed largely interchangeable, and you can all approach them with the same mainstream object-oriented design methodology.

    But just because you are a proficient Java or Eiffel programmer and object-oriented designer doesn't mean that you have a clue about how to write effective code in a functional programming language. You can design functional programs like object-oriented programs, and the result will work, but it will be as tedious as if you had written the code in an object-oriented language to begin with.

    To take advantage of functional languages (or, more generally, other non-object-oriented languages), you have to unlearn pretty much everything you learned about object-oriented design.

    It's quite analogous to the procedural/object-oriented transition: lots of people believed that they could write object oriented code because their procedural coding styles kind of kept working, but they were missing the point. You are missing the point, too, if you think that functional programming is just a small variation of what you are already doing.

    Furthermore, functional programming is very hard to simulate well in object-oriented languages--most attempts end up not being able to provide the invariants and encapsulation that functional programming guarantees automatically, and without the type systems of functional programming languages, many interesting usages are just too complex to type.