Frank Atanassow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Also, I've observed many FP/LP people argue that slow or memory-hungry
> applications aren't such a big deal because "in 5 years, Moore's law will make
> them efficient."
No FP people would admit to producing slow and memory-hungry
applications! :-)
YMMV, but the only functional program that I find slow enough to be
bothersome, is GHC, and it is rather complex, and anyway uses GCC (or
so I gather). Of course, I don't use that many. I do use a lot of
applications written in C++ or similar languages, though.
> They say, "Now I have a shiny new computer, three times faster and
> with twice the memory of my old one. NOW I can run twice as many
> applications three times as fast!"
No, they say "NOW I might get Word to act fast enough to be as useful
as a typewriter once was". (And then their IT guy upgrades Word.) I
bet we lose more cycles due to unintelligent software, than we do to
garbage-collectors and laziness.
And there's plenty of software just aching to be written with a FPL.
Why not start making software *smart*? Where's a grammar analyzer
that actually works? For that matter, where's a program that
understands language semantics?
Or just a mail server witout buffer overruns would be great. *Sigh*
-kzm
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
