[racket] John Carmack on why functional programming matters

But his only reference to Utah is 

 http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/docs/daume02yaht.pdf

so he hasn't really seen the light yet. 


On May 1, 2012, at 11:55 AM, Neil Toronto wrote:

> And how to do it in C++:
> 
>  gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php
> 
> He's not saying anything PLT hasn't been saying for years. But he does say some of them differently. And he's John FRIGGIN' Carmack: the guy behind the first 3D games ever made, and a current game industry mover-and-shaker and icon. He has a chance to reach people we can't.
> 
> I copied some great quotes while I read this. Starting with the one I'm most sad to agree with:
> 
> "... it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be blunt, any other fringe language."
> 
> It's for external reasons, like reliance on proprietary libraries and tool chains, and certification requirements.
> 
> This one should be framed somewhere, for the second sentence:
> 
> "A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention."
> 
> He explains Racket's pragmatic purity rather well:
> 
> "It can be fun in a puzzly sort of way to try to push purity to great lengths..."
> 
> "There is a continuum of value in how pure a function is, and the value step from almost-pure to completely-pure is smaller than that from spaghetti-state to mostly-pure."
> 
> Neil ⊥
> 
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