From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-08-25T13:00:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Functional Programming

Brian Adkins wrote:
> If you like Ruby, you may also enjoy Lisp since it influenced Ruby.
> I'd recommend "Practical Common Lisp" by Peter Seibel. Or "ANSI Common
> Lisp" by Paul Graham. Lastly, the classic "Structure and
> Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman would be
> good.
> 
> Or you can just skip the books and simply stop assigning to
> variables ;)

The graveyards are littered with the bones of programmers who thought
they'd never have to use an imperative language again. And there are
dozens -- maybe even hundreds -- of dead functional, single-assignment,
dataflow, block-diagram, and other "nifty" little magic bullet languages.

Functional programming is harder than imperative programming. Recursion
is harder to understand than iteration. Denotational and axiomatic
semantics of programming languages are harder than operational
semantics. And so on.

Anybody here remember SISAL? ID (Irvine Dataflow)? At least Matz
remembered CLU. :) I personally think Erlang is the last best hope for
functional programming.