🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug19.053005.28328@src.umd.edu>, clin@eng.umd.edu
(Charles Lin) writes:

|>   So, the question is this.  While people are looking
|>to functional languages for their own research purposes,
|>is there a general feeling that these languages ought to
|>be the foundational basis of all work done, or at least
|>most work (in the same way that C is) done?  I doubt there
|>is any kind of academic push to make functional languages
|>the medium of instruction on general, or the language
|>for general "real world" use.

My opinion is:

 o most of the concepts needed (at least I need) are present in LISP
 o we need another syntax for LISP
 o list comprehension, pattern matching, soft typing (and ...?) 
   should be added to LISP
 o a pure functional language might be too difficult to use
   (if we had started with pure functional languages, someone would have
   invented global variables to keep the number of parameters small.)
   -> we need multiparadigm languages, e.g. assignments for some cases 
 o by now functional languages are too slow; we need better optimization
   techniques. This also holds for 'pure' OOP.
 o Haskell probably has too much concepts (this is the case with LISP, too)
 o I regard the work on Haskell and similar languages as very useful
   for research and some day someone has to put the good things into
   a "real world" language.

--
Reinhard Eppler
eppler@cognac.informatik.uni-kl.de

"Would you like to end up with all work done?"