[racket] Code Reuse, Object Oriented vs Functional

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Todd O'Bryan <toddobryan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whoa! I had no idea that Shriram and the rest of the Rice group were
> the impetus for the distillation/clarification and naming of "The
> Expression Problem."

To set the record straight, since this is a public forum:

We (Matthias and I) called it the "Expressivity Problem" and
circulated it amongst many people. We also tracked down many other
prior papers that at least alluded to this issue, though the version
we presented also extends some of these. (Some papers that claim to
"solve" the problem actually do not address the problem as fully
formulated in our paper.)

Phil Wadler heard about the problem from us at ECOOP 1998, where our
paper appeared and which he attended. He initially did not believe
there was a problem, but we clarified this at the q&a of the paper
presentation. We discussed it further the next day on the subway. He
eventually agreed it was a problem worth publicizing as a challenge.

However, he felt our name was too vague and too broad. He therefore
came up with the name "Expression Problem", which is a very nice pun
(expression = "how much can your language express", and expression =
"the terms you are trying to represent are language expressions"). So
the credit for the name very much goes to Wadler.

Shriram