[GTALUG] Google wins over Oracle in Java API copyright suit

[Stewart C. Russell]

(oops, don't you hate it with the mail client silently assumes you only
want to reply to the sender?)

On Fri, 9 Apr 2021 at 11:51, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca <mailto:lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:


    But using a loop means you are telling the system how to do things,
    rather than telling it what you want done and letting it (usually) do
    a better job at the how.


I'd agree if I were doing something like wanting the sum of the values
of a list. /list.sum()/ is going to be many times more efficient than an
accumulator loop on a system that's got any level of vectorization.
Chris Tyler's talk on AARCH64 optimization in gcc a few years back
showed that the code isn't anything like my mental model (somewhere
around a Z80, with faulty memory management) expected.
 

    After all with a loop you are controlling the
    execution order of the processing.  If done right you usually shouldn't
    need to care.


But in document processing, you really really /really/ want the output
to come out in the same order as the input. Which is why functional
languages seemed a strange choice for document transformation. The
absence of side-effects can be handy in document processing, but being
in the right order is usually what publishing houses get paid the big
bucks to do.

I've had to process utility time series power generation data in XSLT.
That was horrid. Order matters a lot there, too.

    But yes functional languages require a different philosophy.  Functional
    languages are not for people that want to micromanage the computer.


Call me old-fashioned, but I want my computers to do what I tell them. I
don't want exceptions, I want results or error messages to explain why.
I know there are many processes running that do things I'll never
understand, but they must prove themselves useful to me or get out of my
way.

cheers,
 Stewart