On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 13:29 +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones 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": > > > 1. Small examples of actual code. The goal here is (a) to convey a > visceral idea of what functional programming *is*, rather than just > assume the audience knows (they don't), and (b) to convey an idea of > why it might be good. One of my favourite examples is quicksort, for > reasons explained here: > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction#What.27s_good_about_functional_programming.3F > > But I'm sure that you each have a personal favourite or two. Would you > like to send them to me, along with a paragraph or two about why you > found it compelling? For this purpose, a dozen lines of code or so is > probably a maximum. > > > 2. War stories from real life. eg "In company X in 2004 they rewrote > their application in Haskell/Caml with result Y". Again, for my > purpose I can't tell very long stories; but your message can give a > bit more detail than one might actually give in a presentation. The > more concrete and specific, the better. E.g. what, exactly, about > using a functional language made it a win for you? > > > If you just reply to me, with evidence of either kind, I'll glue it > together (regardless of whether I find I can use it in my talks), and > put the result on a Wiki page somewhere. In both cases pointers to > blog entries are fine.
This recent blog entry about PLT Scheme may be useful: http://blog.plt-scheme.org/2007/11/getting-rid-of-set-car-and-set-cdr.html _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
