[Haskell-cafe] Can Your Programming Language Do This?

[Ralf Lammel]

Read a sentence like this "If your programming language requires you to
use functors, you're not getting all the benefits of a modern
programming environment. See if you can get some of your money back." 

If this is not a very subtle pun (regarding Java functors vs. Haskell
functors), which probably it isn't, then it is another indication of
sloppiness in Joel's posts on the topic of MapReduce, which he is
essentially alluding to in this new post, which in turn is meant to
remind us of his earlier Java rant that was very much centered around
MapReduce:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html.

It may be Ok that MapReduce is a misnomer (because map and reduce sound
so good; so I am not complaining so much about MapReduce's name), but I
sort of dislike the idea of explaining map and reduce to "ordinary
programmers" with examples that are *not* clear-cut forms of map and
reduce. Just in case, it is not obvious anyhow: MapReduce's map and
reduce are not (Lisp's or Haskell's) map and reduce:
- http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ralf/MapReduce
- http://blogs.msdn.com/ralflammel/archive/2006/06/19/637522.aspx

Ralf (obviously in pedantic mode)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-
> bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Stephane Bortzmeyer
> Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 1:11 AM
> To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Can Your Programming Language Do This?
> 
> >From the excellent programming blog "Joel on software", a very good
> text if you need to convince Java or C programmers that functional
> programming is a A Good Thing.
> 
> Probably all the readers of this list will find it brings nothing new
> (that's perfectly right) but it is oriented towards ordinary
> programmers :-)
> 
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe