While you are correct about the power of concurrent dataflow programming (ie excel;), you are mistaken to suggest that this is not recognised by the FP community. A quick search for 'spreadsheet programming' on citeseer uncovered this:
Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/396896.html
Haxcel: A Spreadsheet Interface to Haskell
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/lisper02haxcel.html
Uncovering Effects of Programming Paradigms: Errors in Two Spreadsheet Systems
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/tukiainen00uncovering.h tml
Spreadsheet Model for Programming
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ambravaneswaran00spread sheet.html
Unfortunately spreadsheets as they currently exist exhibit a striking level of bugs as they attempt to scale to larger systems[tukiainen00], the limitations are well know. Fortunately there is active research into addressing these issues (I've lost the citation, but I remember finding the papers on citeseer).
Yes spreadsheets are a powerful FP mechanism; but there is still a lot of work left to do before they could be considered a candidate silver bullet.
Note that the article is not discussing small programs (where small == 1Mloc). At these levels, premature optimisation dosn't even get you as far as an almost working first version.
We do not know how to manage complexity at these scales. The article is an interesting interview with a very smart and experienced architect who thinks she might have an idea how we might be able to do it.
When you are talking about 10's of millions of lines of code, the answers that survived a 50kloc desktop app break down.
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While you are correct about the power of concurrent dataflow programming (ie excel ;), you are mistaken to suggest that this is not recognised by the FP community. A quick search for 'spreadsheet programming' on citeseer uncovered this:
Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/396896.html
Haxcel: A Spreadsheet Interface to Haskell
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/lisper02haxcel.html
Uncovering Effects of Programming Paradigms: Errors in Two Spreadsheet Systems
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/tukiainen00uncovering.h tml
Spreadsheet Model for Programming
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ambravaneswaran00spread sheet.html
Unfortunately spreadsheets as they currently exist exhibit a striking level of bugs as they attempt to scale to larger systems[tukiainen00], the limitations are well know. Fortunately there is active research into addressing these issues (I've lost the citation, but I remember finding the papers on citeseer).
Yes spreadsheets are a powerful FP mechanism; but there is still a lot of work left to do before they could be considered a candidate silver bullet.
Note that the article is not discussing small programs (where small == 1Mloc). At these levels, premature optimisation dosn't even get you as far as an almost working first version.
We do not know how to manage complexity at these scales. The article is an interesting interview with a very smart and experienced architect who thinks she might have an idea how we might be able to do it.
When you are talking about 10's of millions of lines of code, the answers that survived a 50kloc desktop app break down.