

Functional Programming In Industry - omouse
http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/10/functional-programming-in-industry.html
<i>"Putting my own experiences aside for the now, the focus of this post is functional programming in industry. As an outsider with an interest in the community I often wonder why it is so small and how the situation can be improved. Everyone keeps going on about how beneficial functional programming is over imperative programming: faster development, shorter code, less bug prone and easier to test to name just a few."</i>
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brlewis
In the rare times when Lisp and other functional languages are used in
industry, it's usually to address a difficult or poorly-understood problem,
since those languages tend to be associated with research. It's not surprising
that it would be hard to get a programmer up to speed on such things.

My employer is looking for someone who would enjoy doing Schemey work in a
Java environment, solving not-so-difficult problems. It wasn't hard to find
someone last time around, and I don't think it will be hard this time around
once we fix the job description, which is poorly-written and factually
incorrect.

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yters
Another thing that could help are functional -> industrial language
translators, such as Kawa. At least in this way the programmers can use FPLs
in a normal job setting. If they can show increased productivity, this will
move the market towards FP.

Style is probably still a problem in this case. Can style be automated? I.e.
can FP code be translated into correctly formatted industrial code?

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brlewis
Kawa does not translate functional languages into Java; it compiles them
directly to JVM bytecodes. There is never any "industrial language" to style.

Incidentally, the political issue with FP is not demonstrating productivity,
it's demonstrating a low level of organizational risk, i.e. finding someone to
take over when a functional programmer leaves.

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yters
I haven't research the conversion process carefully, but from what I know it
converts the code into class files, which can be reverse engineered into java
files. Tedious and it wouldn't produce very readable code, though, so not
really a solution.

Anyways, your second statement shows you missed my point. If there are
translators as I described then any average java programmer can take over the
functional programmers job without having to know functional programming.

~~~
anamax
Huh? If the reverse-engineered java isn't readable, what are the average java
programmers going to do with it?

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yters
Notice the part where I said Kawa isn't really a solution? It was meant as an
example of something _like_ what I'm talking about, but not quite.

