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OCaml For the Masses
CowboyRobot writes "Yaron Minsky of Jane Street argues that the time has come for statically-typed functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. He cites many reasons and illustrates what he says is the most important, concision: 'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'"
haskell for "the masses" is possible as soon as "the masses" has a degree in mathematics. java and php are copy-and-paste languages, functional languages simply take more thinking to compile at all, and i think many programmers are not prepared to do that to the required degree, although i'd love to be proved wrong.
All other things are not equal though, are they? Procedural programming is easier for humans to understand: most of us do no not think in a way that maps easily to functional programming.
My favorite code to read is OOP stuff written by coders who understand and make use of functional programming concepts. They know how to write things that are stateless when that makes sense, and use state in an appropriate manner when that makes sense.
And yes, by all means use it when appropriate. But don't think that Lisp is always the right language for scripting your text editor (dodges blow from Emacs partisan).
I am officially gone from
If shorter, more concise code was always better, we'd have switched to APL years ago.
We didn't.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'
That was the idea behind APL. You could do amazing things in one line of code. I never, however, knew anyone who used it who thought it was easier to read, easier to write or easier to maintain.