Functional programming is a fine idea that has been around for a long time. Church's lambda calculus predates electronic digital computers, and LISP dates back to circa 1960. It is attractive because it theoretically lends itself better to more formal proofs of correctness (my own gut tells me that for complex systems, the "bugs" will simply become bugs in the specifications).
What's not obvious to me is how to get there from here. Let me use an analogy inspired by this year's Bhaskar family vacation. From the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the North Rim is a dozen miles away and easily visible on a clear day. But the road is a 200 mile roundabout drive that takes the best part of a day. The most direct route, 5,0000 feet down, and 5,000 feet up, is more arduous than the indirect route. Bringing functional programming to VistA today by linking Haskell to GT.M may be like the direct route from one rim to the other. A few rugged individuals in good shape may undertake it and succeed, but they will lose any part of the VistA community that attempts to follow. A more circuitous route, for example, via object oriented programming and linking to Perl (or Python or PHP) may be a more achievable first step in the journey. -- Bhaskar On Sat, 2005-12-03 at 21:37 -0600, Kevin Toppenberg wrote: > Thanks for the link. I just went through it. It only took me a few > hours to digest it. > > I still don't think I could write a full appliation in it so far. > > Kevin ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7637&alloc_id=16865&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
