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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 01:58:02PM -0400, David Mason via talk wrote:
> The key part of what Lennart wrote is “if done right”. How could you imagine that the functional program would return the results out of order? Compilers/interpreters are allow to make whatever optimizations they want, as long as time and memory consumption are the only things that change from the original!

Certainly if I have a list of numbers 3 6 4 9 2 and I say, add 2 to
each thing in this list, I don't really care what order that is done it,
how many threads are working on it, as long as the result is 5 8 6 11 4.
If the order was different, then the language is broken.  I don't think
any of the functional languages woudl mes that up.

> XSLT is a very specific functional language, designed for a very particular job, which (from my limited experience) it does somewhere between “adequately" and “very well”. But while it may be Turing complete, it is not a general purpose language and I would not want to program such problems with it!!! Pure lambda-calculus and Turing machines are also Turing complete, but you sure wouldn’t want to be programming in those either.

No kidding.

> Haskell, Scheme, OCaML, Erlang/Elixir, Scala are much, much friendlier languages for general purpose programming. All the ML dialects, as well as Scheme and Scala support more imperative programming as well, that can help with the transition.

I haven't used any of them very much, but the bits I have done was
very nice.

ML's polymorphism is such a neat way to handle things.

-- 
Len Sorensen