[Haskell-cafe] Game of life in haskell.

[Jon Harrop]

On Tuesday 02 February 2010 18:44:25 David Leimbach wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Jon Harrop <jon at ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> > I meant the scalability and speed. An imperative solution should be
> > simpler, more scalable and faster than any purely functional solution.
>
> That's a pretty strange comment.  Why do you think an imperative solution
> is simpler, faster and more scalable?

Mutation can avoid lots of unnecessary allocations and indirections with 
minimal risk of error in this case.

> If functional programming can't provide any one of those, it's not worth
> anything,

I doubt programming paradigms live or die according to whether or not they can 
implement Conway's Game of Life simply and efficiently.

> and based on the membership in this list, the interest in it 
> these days, and the fact that I've seen many occasions where functional
> programming lends itself to a faster implementation (in terms of time to
> implement and test) that's actually readable sooner than a lot of
> imperative approaches...

Of Conway's Game of Life?

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e