Venkat on Functional Languages: I Knew He Was Smart

By Robert Fischer | Published: July 14, 2007

Those of you in the functional programming community probably haven’t been hanging out at No Fluff Just Stuff conferences, and so you probably don’t know Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. That is really a shame, because he is a entertaining and informative presenter, as well as an insightful consultant who gets both the technical and business aspects of software development. This is all true and I deeply appreciate the guy’s work even though I disagree with his disdain for constructors.

I really enjoy reading his blog, and was pleasantly surprised to find this little jewel in his post ‘Article on Languages that never took off’:

Certain languages have far reaching contribution even if they may not be the most popular language or most popular currently. We are just beginning to appreciate Functional Programming. Soon when several processors on a computer (and laptops) becomes a standard, ability to not just model, but implement concurrent tasks effectively will become an important and pressing issue. We will soon be looking for languages (or at least language constructs) that abstract it for us. I think it is an interesting time in the language space.

Hey hey hey! It’s like he reads this blog or something. It’s nice to know that this idea doesn’t just exist in the head of Brian and I, but that it’s getting into the back of the mind of some real smarties out there.

Related posts:

  1. Venkat on Objects, Properties, and Constructors
  2. They Knew It, They Did It, and They Meant To Do It
  3. Functional Language Adoption
  4. Functional Code Win of the Day
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  • Brian

    First of all, brainfuck, befunge, and INTERCAL are all joke languages. INTERCAL being the most obvious one- it started as an April Fools day joke, until someone wrote a compiler for it. They were never intended to become mainstream programming languages, nor have they had a significant impact on the programming languages community.

    You have to judge a language on the basis of what the goals for that language were. Likewise, I wouldn’t call Haskell a failure at all, more like a roaring success. It’s principal goal was to serve as a basis for research into functional (especially strongly typed lazy functional) programming languages. And as for the problems with laziness, they exist- but imperitive code has problems as well.

    And there are several languages not on the list that I think should be. For example: Smalltalk, the ur-OO language. Metalanguage, the common ancestor of SML, Ocaml, and Haskell, and the introducer of the Hindley-Milner type inference algorithm and non-Lisp functional programming. Or Objective-C- in many ways, Java owes more to Objective-C than it does to C++ (interfaces, for example). Or Prolog and the logical languages. In many ways I wonder if business logic wouldn’t be better implemented in a Prolog-like language than in any OO or even functional language.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertfischer Robert Fischer

    Yeah — there’s a major question about what the author means by “took off”. To say that Smalltalk or Haskell didn’t take off requires that one ignore the number of very passionate folks who still code and advocate for those languages.

    Underlying the entire article seemed to be the assumption that languages cannot be said to have “took off” until they have widespread business adoption. In other words, only FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++, VB, C#, Java, Perl, and Ruby “took off”.

    Personally, I didn’t care for the article — because of that implicit bias, the underlying cause for while each and every language has not “took off” is because business never bothered to adopt it. And that goes back to marketing.

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