[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell in Industry

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Aug 11, 2010, at 7:30 PM, Ketil Malde wrote:
> Sure, if the premise is that investment banks (or the military) are evil,
> then it is morally questionable to support them.  If these are the
> major consumers of functional programming, one might question the ethics
> of working on FP in general as well.
> 
> But as I interpreted this thread, the premise was not about the morality
> of specific sectors, but rather that finance "takes away" too much of
> the FP talent.

One (but only one, and I do not say the major one)
of the aspects of the "global financial crisis" is that
bankers created a number of "advanced" financial instruments
which nobody really knew how to value.
"Advanced" computational models were developed for the purpose.
People were warning about this 10 years ago or more; I bought a
couple of books about it from a remainder shop.

If functional programming gets associated in the profession's
eyes with *that* kind of programming, it will not do FP any good.

In any case, what with lambda expressions already in Apple's C
(of all languages!), it's clear that FP ideas are becoming mainstream
_without_ any need of help from the financial community.  (Actually,
that particular one is probably due to Objective C with its Smalltalk
influence, so the "functional" origin here is ultimately Lisp.)