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Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
Jerzy -- you are correct in that efficiency matters. Some thoughts:
1. How it can possibly matter to beginners (<= 2 years of training)?
They don't even know how to write a correct program.
2. In most software, including engineering and scientific software,
there are many different criteria:
Correctness
Reliability
Robustness
Maintainability
Testability
Reusability
Utility
Performance
If we don't teach about these and why they matter, we neglect important
things.
3. Whatever we do, we should not teach full Scheme, full Haskell, or full
ML in a university course. The emphasis should be to show how one can
build programs that measure well according to the above.
4. The FP community spent two decades of energy on making programs run
fast. Perl and Python didn't pay attention, they come from behind, and
they win. So does efficiency matter to get the "market share"?
5. Once you have market share, you have demand and resources to spend on
making your languages efficient. Otherwise it's premature. We just don't
have the manpower that is behind Fortran or C compilers. Considering
that it is absolutely amazing how well FP languages do.
Enough said -- Matthias
- References:
- Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
- From: Noel Welsh <noelwelsh@yahoo.com>
- Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
- From: Jerzy Karczmarczuk <karczma@info.unicaen.fr>
- Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
- From: Matthias Felleisen <matthias@ccs.neu.edu>
- Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
- From: Matthias Felleisen <matthias@ccs.neu.edu>
- Re: Strong Typing, Dynamic Languages, What to do?
- From: Jerzy Karczmarczuk <karczma@info.unicaen.fr>