🚀 go-pugleaf

In <348@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (myself)!) writes:

>HELP! I am trying to raise the profile of FP in our undergraduate degree in
>computing. Having failed to persuade my colleagues that we should move beyond
>Pascal(!), I'm trying to get our intermediate-level (2nd year) Functional and
>...

OOPS! I failed to mention that ``beyond Pascal'' applied to 1st year teaching.
Actually, we get around to Modula-2 and C in second year. Apologies to any of
my colleagues reading this.

Paul Bailes
(paul@cs.uq.oz.au)

In article <348@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> paul@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>HELP! I am trying to raise the profile of FP in our undergraduate degree in
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>PLEASE can anyone supply me with examples/references to
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>(2) examples of FP-written RPs that do ``nice'' IO (in order to satisfy
>    people who think UI prototyping is necessary as well as functional
>    prototyping.
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[RP--rapid prototyping; UI--user interface]  This relates
to a question I've been thinking of posting for the last
week.  I'll introduce it with a bit of background.

I'm very naive about FP; all I know is what I read, 'cause
I haven't yet gone to the trouble of setting myself up
with an FP environment.  I'm a mathematician, and FP sure
looks right to me, but I know I have a lot more to learn.

My daily work for the last few years has involved a lot of
UI considerations.  In 1991, I've been Xprogramming.  As-
sume with me that X is a commercial success, but that
event-driven paradigms are a hurdle for many coders and
engineers.  How do mature FP thinkers react to this?

I'm not primarily looking for a textbook reference, although
any advice will get my attention.  What I want are some
down-to-earth words, perhaps on this model:  "Sure, the
usual model for UI is a dialogue--the user does something,
the computer does something, the user does something else,
and so on.  All this temporal sequencing seems antithetical
to FP principles, and of course the usual ways of imple-
menting the state of the dialogue make a funny joke in FP
circles; however, the way we see it is {FILL-IN-THIS-BLANK}."

A postscript:  if someone knows what FP environment is free,
easy-to-install on a PC or SPARCstation, and good practice
for autodidacts, I'm ready to listen.
--

Cameron Laird		USA 713-579-4613
cl@lgc.com		USA 713-996-8546 

paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (P.A.)) writes:

>...  made a prerequisite for our advanced-level (3rd year)
>Software Engineering project, the grounds being that FP (and LP) are good for
>Rapid Prototyping.

>PLEASE can anyone supply me with examples/references to

This is interesting.  Why do you think that functional programming is
good for this sort of thing if you cannot quote evidence from which you
have concluded that it is good for this sort of thing (apart from
faith---halleluja praise the Lord (Alonzo Church in this case I
suppose)). 

I do not blame your colleagues for being unconvinced.  Deciding
arbitararily that something is the case, and then looking for evidence
to support that proposition is not exactly good methodology. 

Sean

P.S.  This is not a criticism of functional programming, just a
criticism of a suspect belief system.

In article <368@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> paul@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>In <348@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (myself)!) writes:
>
>>HELP! I am trying to raise the profile of FP in our undergraduate degree in
>>computing. Having failed to persuade my colleagues that we should move beyond

Well, at the risk of having tactical nukes directed this way from the Real FP
types...

I realize that university types involved in language design etc don't have much truck with mundane issues such as Real Life Applications. However, if you look
at the ACM SIGAPL proceedings, you'll see a number of articles on such
topics as:

a. Functional Programming in APL. AI, Games, etc. here.

b. APL for Prototyping(APL86 in particular). Hitachi used APL for prototyping
   a new PL/I compiler, and claims that it shortened development time by 1/3!
   (If you have ever written a PL/I compiler or even used PL/I, you'll
    realize how huge a savings this is).

c. J: A new dialect of APL, which uses the ASCII character set, and which we
   hope has discarded a number of design errors we made in APL. J is MUCH
   more functional than APL ( You can merge two arrays to make a third --
   no need for indexed assignment). Recent work by Roger Hui and yrs trly
   involve Function Arrays, called Gerunds, which make functions first class
   objects in the language. See earlier work by me in APL84 (SIGAPL Quote Quad
    vol 14, no 4).

Bob

In <9309@castle.ed.ac.uk> sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews) writes:

>paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (P.A.)) writes:

>>...  made a prerequisite for our advanced-level (3rd year)
>>Software Engineering project, the grounds being that FP (and LP) are good for
>>Rapid Prototyping.

>>PLEASE can anyone supply me with examples/references to

>This is interesting.  Why do you think that functional programming is
>good for this sort of thing if you cannot quote evidence from which you
>have concluded that it is good for this sort of thing (apart from
>faith---halleluja praise the Lord (Alonzo Church in this case I
>suppose)). 

AMAZING! It sounds as if you are saying that the only legitimate
grounds for advocating some technique etc. are its prior (satisfactory)
uses. How then may someone advocate something innovative? I'm
sorry if I have misunderstood you, but your posting is open to this
sort of interpretation.

>I do not blame your colleagues for being unconvinced.  Deciding
>arbitararily that something is the case, and then looking for evidence
>to support that proposition is not exactly good methodology. 

Who's decided something arbitrarily? There are criteria other than
experience for assessing the merits of a technique (but then, what
you said above leaves open the possibility that you disagree).

>Sean

>P.S.  This is not a criticism of functional programming, just a
>criticism of a suspect belief system.

To what ``belief system'' do you refer?

Paul Bailes

paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (P.A.)) writes:

>In <9309@castle.ed.ac.uk> sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews) writes:

>>paul@cs.uq.oz.au (Paul Bailes (P.A.)) writes:

>>This is interesting.  Why do you think that functional programming is
>>good for this sort of thing if you cannot quote evidence from which you
>>have concluded that it is good for this sort of thing (apart from
>>faith---halleluja praise the Lord (Alonzo Church in this case I
>>suppose)). 

>AMAZING! It sounds as if you are saying that the only legitimate
>grounds for advocating some technique etc. are its prior (satisfactory)
>uses. How then may someone advocate something innovative? I'm

One might say:

`Perhaps functional programming languages are a good tool for
prototyping software, certainly my personal experience on small programs
suggests that they *might* be.  I will run some experiments to see if my
intuition is good and this is really true.'

Or one might say:

`I have seen described/worked on several projects where functional
programming languages were used more effectively than other approaches
that I have seen/used for developing prototypes of software'.

But one would not say:

`I was told by someone once that functional programming languages are
good for rapid prototyping.  Let's rearrange the syllabus of the computer
science course on this basis.'

A suspect belief system is a belief system where things are believed
without good reason to think that they are true.  It is, of course,
possible for a suspect belief system to believe things that are true,
but then the first test of a good belief system is that it does not
believe anything false, rather than what it believes that is true.

Sean

In <9343@castle.ed.ac.uk> sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews) writes:

>..............

>One might say:

>`Perhaps functional programming languages are a good tool for
>prototyping software, certainly my personal experience on small programs
>suggests that they *might* be.  I will run some experiments to see if my
>intuition is good and this is really true.'

>Or one might say:

>`I have seen described/worked on several projects where functional
>programming languages were used more effectively than other approaches
>that I have seen/used for developing prototypes of software'.

>But one would not say:

>`I was told by someone once that functional programming languages are
>good for rapid prototyping.  Let's rearrange the syllabus of the computer
>science course on this basis.'

Very good, and all true. What's not true is the possible implication that the
final, ``would not say'' position is a position that I hold. What makes you
think I do, if at all? Who would be so unprofessional?

Paul Bailes

(PS apologies to other readers for all this, but S Matthews' public
comments require a public response. Thanks to all those who have
answered my RFI - please keep them coming. PB)