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

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2021-04-09 1:58 p.m., 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?

Well, this particular DSSSL thing did occasionally put lists out of
order, and didn't have a good way of peeking at items before or after in
the list. You sometimes need to do that in setting books.

> XSLT … is not a general purpose language and I would not want to
> program such problems with it!!!

The input data was in XML, so XSLT was the perfect language (supposedly)
for the task. I think the agency responsible for generating the data
spent quite a bit of money making it as hard to use as possible - it was
data that was required by law to be published, but Difficult Questions
might be asked of the agency if it were ever closely analyzed. So they
wrapped it up in quite the worst XML format I've ever seen.

I realize that these are domain-specific examples, but my experience of
functional languages was of unnecessary complexity and putting rules in
the way of getting results.

cheers,
 Stewart