

Write a mind-blowing sudoku solver, the thread will drift on webservers. Sh*t. - gghh
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2005/11/3b2cd69d79484a1bc2c5f9aea4214836.en.html

======
Sos_Oganessian
People will take any opportunity to talk about what they know. Software
engineers are like athletes, they need their ego's stroked more often than
they should. And if no else will do it, well they might as well do it
themselves. At least peacocks are more honest and upfront when they do it.

Speaking of which, who want to talk about incredibly fast methods of protein
folding, just re- this comment... kiddin'. Please don't.

------
erikb
What's the point of the story? Don't get it. Do you agree with Oliver's
statement, or do you think people should have talked more about sudoku
solvers?

~~~
gghh
Well, both.

I think that we need mind-blowing sudoku solvers where Alonzo-Church-oriented
minds shows the more Turing-Machine-inclined fellas what kind of terseness you
can achieve with functional programmming (simple problems are the best to
explain features of a programming paradigm), and I also believe that we need
webservers that go beyond 10k simultaneous connections while still being
simple and maintanable and modular (i.e., real life functional programming).

I just find that that thread shows perfectly how the functional programming
folks perceive themselves as not having a real killer application for what
they believe is a paradigm that suits a certain class of problems like a
glove. "Haskell is the language that everybody talks about [like I am doing
here :-)], but nobody uses" said Simon Peyton-Jones. There are only a few
industrial applications of FP, I am thinking of the trading firm Jane Street
and the security company galois.com . It didn't take off yet, I'd say.

But I don't want this thread to replicate that troll -- i.e. becaming an Emacs
Vs Vim kind of discussion. I just believe that the thread linked above well
reflects a situation deeply rooted in the programming community.

------
batista
Well, the thread did not shift to "webservers", it shifted on the topic "well,
Sudoku solvers are nice, but were are the real world _Alonzo-Church_ style
programs, and why are we functional types living off of C and the like for
most of real world use?

