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RE: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"
From: |
Drew Adams |
Subject: |
RE: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?" |
Date: |
Thu, 1 Aug 2013 09:18:03 -0700 (PDT) |
> And so assignment disappearing from C to haskell makes haskell programmers
> able to have better thoughts [Well they say 100% of the time; I say 80% of
> the time ;-) ]
See John Hughes's classic paper, "Why Functional Programming Matters", 1984:
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf
>From the Introduction:
"The special characteristics and advantages of functional programming are often
summed up more or less as follows. Functional programs contain no assignment
statements, so variables, once given a value, never change. More generally,
functional programs contain no side-effects at all....
Such a catalogue of "advantages" is all very well, but one must not be
surprised
if outsiders don't take it too seriously. It says a lot about what functional
programming is not (it has no assignment, no side effects, no flow of control)
but not much about what it is. The functional programmer sounds rather like a
medieval monk, denying himself the pleasures of life in the hope that it will
make him virtuous. To those more interested in material benefits, these
"advantages" are not very convincing....
It is a logical impossibility to make a language more powerful by omitting
features, no matter how bad they may be....
Even a functional programmer should be dissatisfied with these so-called
advantages, because they give him no help in exploiting the power of
functional languages. One cannot write a program which is particularly lacking
in assignment statements, or particularly referentially transparent. There is
no yardstick of program quality here, and therefore no ideal to aim at."
That motivates the paper, but the paper itself is about why functional
programming really *does* matter: what it offers that is additional and
different,
and not just what it omits or avoids. I heartily recommend it.
(http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DrewAdams#WhyFunctionalProgrammingMatters)
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", (continued)
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/01
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Stefan Monnier, 2013/08/01
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Rustom Mody, 2013/08/01
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Stefan Monnier, 2013/08/01
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/01
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", drain, 2013/08/02
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/03
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", drain, 2013/08/04
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- LaTeX (was: Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"), Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/05
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Óscar Fuentes, 2013/08/02
- RE: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?",
Drew Adams <=
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/01
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Barry Margolin, 2013/08/01
- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Rustom Mody, 2013/08/01
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- Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Emanuel Berg, 2013/08/01
Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?", Pascal J. Bourguignon, 2013/08/01