On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Brian Hurt <bhur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What's this awk-a-mel he speaks of? Ocaml, pronounced oh-camel, I > know very well, but I've never heard of this awk-a-mel. :-) > > Seriously, his pronunciation of "ocaml" highlights, I think, the core > problem of his talk. There has been significant development in > languages, just not in the popular languages. It's been over there in > the "fringe" languages. I will confess that as I listened to the presentation (when I got the email with Tim's link, I just started the video while I was working on some drudgery), I felt like he missed some of the language features promoted in functional languages. He worded functional programming contributions in terms of advancing the idea of limiting/protecting variable assignment (immutability), and to me, that's missing the points of first class functions (which, in light of what he says OOP languages brought to the table, actually provided protected function pointers through purely functional languages without any need for OOP) and an emphasis on function purity and limiting the scope of unpure functions (to me, this goes beyond merely protecting assignment.) These omissions, coupled with the mispronunciations of functional programming language names, and the value placed on the last language being homoiconic (without much justification) had me wondering how much he actually has used languages such as OCaml or Haskell. I don't need to know how many digits somebody can recite Pi to, but I would like to know how his experience with awk-a-mel lead him to believe that functional programming comes down to protecting variable assignment :) That all said, if Clojure is the seed for the last language, I'd be a happy man. Adam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
