[Haskell-cafe] Re: In-place modification

[Aaron Denney]

On 2007-07-10, Sebastian Sylvan <sebastian.sylvan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/07/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
>> > On 10/07/07, Alex Queiroz <asandroq at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>      So you think we use C because we like it? :-) When this
>> >> revolutionary tool of yours arrive that compiles Haskell to PIC
>> >> devices, I'm gonna be the first to use it.
>> >>
>> >
>> > No, you use it because you have to, there is very little choice. Which
>> > is exactly my point.
>> >
>> > I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that when nobody uses C for
>> > desktop applications, games etc. anymore because there's a better
>> > language available and widely supported, that some version of this
>> > "next mainstream language" will make it onto embedded devices too.
>> >
>> > The revolution (tm) won't come at the same time for all domains. C is
>> > probably used/supported in embedded devices mostly because it's
>> > popular for non-embedded devices (not because C is somehow uniquely
>> > suited for embedded devices). So what happens when something else is
>> > popular, when most industries have stopped using C and almost nobody
>> > coming from university knows it very well or at all? Isn't it likely
>> > that a lot of vendors will write compilers targeting embedded devices
>> > for this new popular language?
>>
>> Mmm... a garbage-collected language on a PIC with single-digit RAM
>> capacity? That's going to be fun! :-D
>>
>> OTOH, isn't somebody out there using Haskell to design logic? (As in,
>> computer ICs.) I doubt you'll even run "Haskell" on a PIC, but you might
>> well use it to *construct* a program that works on a PIC...
>>
>
> Yeah, and 640K should be enough for everybody... Again, the original
> statement was about 20 years down the line. Go back 20 years and
> people would say similar things about C (comparing it to assembly).

And assembly is still widely used.  Moore's law as applied to the
embedded domain has a lot of the transistors going to more, cheaper
devices, not bigger ones.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-