<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Grant Rettke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:grettke@acm.org" target="_blank">grettke@acm.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Matthias Felleisen<br>
<<a href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu" target="_blank">matthias@ccs.neu.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
</div><div>> FP has failed to reach out and demonstrate concretely to such people "how _it_ works and is superior to what they have."<br>
<br>
</div>Is that one of the duties of your academic career? Personal philosophy?<br>
<br>
The most popular programming trends today encourage acceptance without<br>
question and utilization without understanding fueled mostly by highly<br>
charismatic individuals and/or big corporations. The motto "Thinking<br>
is not required" sums it up.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>IMHO two non-marketing factors for the success of language platforms in the past decade are 1) vast amount of libraries written in the language to reduce mundane work, and/or 2) the language fills a niche that hasn't yet been addressed. Many FPs suffer #1. Erlang appears to have momentum behind them as they tackle multi processing quite well.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Compared to the mainstream; there is little material that shows why<br>
"FP is so great"; but the material, and more importantly the people,<br>
are out there; it just requires a highly motivated individual to take<br>
the effort to find out why.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>Learning FP today is similar to "exercise and floss are good for you", yet for many it's too much to bother. Their day jobs and lives are hard enough as is.<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
That individual is likely to be a fractional percentage of the overall<br>
community. *That* is the problem.<br>
<div></div></blockquote><div><br>But people are motivated toward pleasure and away from pain, so if learning FP is going to cause too much pain, it's going to be a non starter. <br><br>Paraphrasing Joel Spolsky, <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Micro-ISV.html" target="_blank">you can't find customers if you can't explain what their pains are</a>. So if we want greater adoptions (and a shelf life after school) then FP must attempt to solve some problems for people in work settings, better than what they are already familiar with.<br>
<br>Erlang is a good <a href="http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/ppxt/HT2007/general/languages/armstrong-erlang_history.pdf">case study</a> on how a company adopts and develop FP when other alternatives failed.<br>
<br><br></div></div>