On Jan 23, 2008 8:29 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Friends > > Over the next few months I'm giving two or three talks to groups of *non* > functional programmers about why functional programming is interesting and > important. If you like, it's the same general goal as John Hughes's famous > paper "Why functional programming matters". > > Audience: some are technical managers, some are professional programmers; but > my base assumption is that none already know anything much about functional > programming. > > Now, I can easily rant on about the glories of functional programming, but > I'm a biased witness -- I've been doing this stuff too long. So this message > is ask your help, especially if you are someone who has a somewhat-recent > recollection of realising "wow, this fp stuff is so cool/useful/powerful/etc". > > I'm going to say some general things, of course, about purity and effects, > modularity, types, testing, reasoning, parallelism and so on. But I hate > general waffle, so I want to give concrete evidence, and that is what I > particularly want your help with. I'm thinking of two sorts of "evidence":
I'm still very much a newbie, but the one thing that struck me as the best feature coming from Python is the static typing. Changing the type of a function in Python will lead to strange runtime errors that take some work to debug, whereas, when I tinker with a program in Haskell, I already know it will work once it compiles. -Yaakov _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
