[plt-scheme] Re: More pedagogic stuff

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:41:04 -0400, "Shriram Krishnamurthi"
<sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:

>I was asked what I dislike about this article.  Besides the simplistic
>reasoning, I am opposed to the whole idea of programming languages (or
>even much of programming) being organized around "paradigms".  Here is
>a short and intentionally somewhat provocative article that I recently
>wrote about this:
>
>http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-teach-pl-post-linnaean/

Given that you consider languages as aggregations of features, rather
than being defined by taxonomies, it would be interesting to learn
your opinion on the multi-paradigm programming language Oz (and the
associated programming system Mozart) (see http://www.mozart-oz.org/).

This programming language accompanied the introductory computer
science textbook _ Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer
Programming_ (see http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html), by Peter
Van Roy and Seif Haridi.  Their premise is that "the conventional
boundaries between paradigms are artificial and limiting," and attempt
to "show programming as a unified discipline."

However, because they used Erlang, Haskell, Java, and Prolog as
representative members of separate paradigms, it would seem that they
still fall into the fallacy, as you would probably put it, of
definining languages by taxonomies, which is what you oppose.

Am I correct in assuming that you would be opposed to their approach,
and would rather dissect these languages into their constituent
features?

-- Benjamin L. Russell