[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell in Industry

[Ben Moseley]

>
> it's clear that FP ideas are becoming mainstream
>_without_ any need of help from the financial community
>

This is far from clear - unless you want to deny that the financial community has had any impact on FP...

> due to Objective C with its Smalltalk influence

...and it's interesting to note that, had it not been for the financial community there's a strong chance that NeXT / Objective-C would have died years ago (finance were one of their main markets).

--Ben

On 12 Aug 2010, at 03:03, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

> 
> 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.)
> 
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