How to get functional software engineering experience?

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 04:47:13PM -0500, Jeffrey Palmer wrote:

> Are there any options for people like me, or does my functional experience 
> remain limited to the hobby* work I can squeeze in at night and on weekends?
> 
> Thoughts?

The first thing you have to understand is that there isn't a lot of
functional (or even declarative) software engineering experience out
there.

Going into academia wouldn't help even if you were qualified.  With all
due respect to the fine people who have produced some wonderful pieces
of software, they tend to concentrate on research rather than
engineering, as they should.

On the other hand, it's an exciting time to do engineering in
declarative languages, because we can invent the design patterns and
discover what the good habits are as we go along.

Yay for the bleeding edge.

Slight digression: Would it be good to have a forum to discuss the
specific issues which arise when doing software engineering in Haskell,
or declarative languages in general?  Just a thought...

All I can suggest that you do is if you have some leeway in how you
implement something, do it in Haskell.  Especially if it's a tool to
be used internally.

> * I'm building a realistic image synthesis package in Haskell, if anyone's 
> interested.  ;)

You've got me curious now.  I was using Haskell last year while
working in the visual effects industry.  We might discuss this
off-list...

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage