From: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Lin)
Subject: Questions from soc.college
Reply-To: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles C. Lin)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 05:30:05 GMT


   Hi, again, folks.  Ignore this if you wish to read something
deeply serious about lambda lifting (whatever that is).

   There's been some talk in the group soc.college about
selecting computer science as a major.  Someone had
been wondering what languages some places might teach,
as well as the usual questions of whether research
or teaching is more important to a professor.

   Some folks have been arguing a more practical point of
view.  That is, languages like Pascal or Lisp is pretty
much useless in the "real world", and universities should
use some sort of real world language and deal with real
world projects.   Specifically, one person felt that
universities that taught Scheme-like languages as first
languages were too "theoretical", and that wasn't going
to get jobs.

    Now, I know that a quick response would be to say
that a course shouldn't focus on a language, and any
other languages can be easily picked up when the
concepts of one are known.  One programs into a language
not in a language (Gries?).

   So, the question is this.  While people are looking
to functional languages for their own research purposes,
is there a general feeling that these languages ought to
be the foundational basis of all work done, or at least
most work (in the same way that C is) done?  I doubt there
is any kind of academic push to make functional languages
the medium of instruction on general, or the language
for general "real world" use.

   Is it a danger that most people have to be "converted"
to learn functional languages?  Is it harder to learn?
Are people satisfied that most users of functional languages
seem to be purely in academia?   And even then,  it seems
that only researchers in functional languages use any
of the newer languages.  For example, never once have
I heard our group say "You know LISP is really not
such a great language, let's go to ML or Miranda".  

   I think it's implicitly understood that there is
so much support for LISP and that most of the AI
community understands LISP, and that it could take
a considerable amount of time to get proficient in,
say, Haskell.

   Obviously, one problem is currently support for
the language, in the sense of debugging tools.  Another
is availability.  But languages like PL/1 have been
around for ages, and have never really caught on.

   So, how compelling should it be for people to
learn functional languages or program primarily
in it?   Strangely enough, C was probably never meant
to be the language for everyday use, but since so
much software (for UNIX and related utilities) were
written, it already had lots of people using it and
maintaining it.

   Thoughts on the matter may be e-mailed or posted
if somehow it is felt that the volume in this group
is too low.

   By the way, I tries asking similar questions 
about logic programming as I did a few weeks ago
here.  No one bit, and the topic went away.

--
Charles Lin
clin@eng.umd.edu

Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional