On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 02:01:39PM -0600, Frank Tobin wrote:
> John BEPPU, at 12:50 -0700 on Sat, 31 Mar 2001, wrote:
>
> > I like pure too, but I'm afraid the nuance of it will be
> > completely lost on non-Functional programmers.
>
> not to worry... If anything, it might educate them. I
> didn't really grok functional programming before I got
> to experiment w/ some functional idioms in a perl context.
> I also like "pure" for its great potential in perl poetry. ;-)
>
> "not to worry"??? I don't think this attitude is useful for deciding how
> to name thing. You don't decide things merely on the idea of "how things
> should be"; you have to grasp what the average programmers is going to
> think of it.
Without commenting on main theme of this thread, although I have plenty
of opinions on that too, and not wanting to open too many cans of
worms, may I simply mention that I hope we are not trying to cater too
much to the average programmer? There are already plenty of languages
that will do that.
Perl has always been an expert friendly language. That doesn't mean
that beginning or average programmers cannot use it, but rather that by
using it, by reading the documentation and code from expert programmers,
they may be able to improve and become better programmers.
I think that is a fine stand for a computer language.
> Just because one programming paradigm happens to name it "pure" doesn't
> mean that name should be carried over to other paradigms. In a
> functional-programming context, sure, "pure" might be a good name. But in
> a non-functional context, the name has little meaning with regards to the
> concept of "nosideeffects".
By using a correct term, although it may be unknown to the average
programmer, the programmer is presented with an oportunity to learn, and
may even be exposed to a completely new programming paradigm.
And, by the way, it is already possible to do reasonable functional
programming in Perl, and it looks as though Perl6 will provide even more
support.
--
Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pjcj.net
