Nice. Thanks. My suspicions were piqued when I read Kellogg's statement: "Honestly though, I don't think FP is ever going to become fully mainstream."
Roger Critchlow wrote at 12/05/2012 01:32 PM: > My boss sent me the Microsoft Research paper on mutability annotations > yesterday, > > http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170528/msr-tr-2012-79.pdf > > I've been writing distributed parallel code in Erlang for several years, > now, and the immutability of functional data is absolutely necessary, but > not sufficient, to make things work. So I expect that they can annotate > their C# with all this mutability markup, making it incredibly ugly and > incomprehensible in the process, and that it will work, sort of, some of > the time, for limited circumstances. Probably better than hand built > multi-threaded code, but probably not as well as well crafted Erlang trees > of supervised processes mutating state via tail calls. Managing mutability > only prevents you from making certain classes of egregious errors, it > doesn't solve everything, it just enables you to continue. > > We're very successful clock makers as a species. As long as all the parts > of a mechanism are connected together into a causal graph, so we can > twiddle this part and see what it does, then we can work things out and > make wonderfully complicated clocks. Hence we make really awesome > electrical power generation stations, huge electron factories of enormous > complication. But, when we connect our generators together into grids, we > have a history of oops where a squirrel or a tree and an unforeseen causal > connection takes millions of dollars of clocks offline in a few minutes. > We fix the problem, and it happens again in a different way. We > understand how to engineer the generator, because it's a clock. We're > still learning how to not engineer the grid on the fly, because it's a > parallel distributed system which only works like a clock when it wants to > tease us. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
