Interesting article on programming languages

[Skip Montanaro]

    Alexander> Interestingly, he discards the entire class of functional
    Alexander> programming languages within the first two paragraphs, then
    Alexander> summarises his article with the 'needed facilities' the
    Alexander> industry will need in the next decade ... which, perversely
    Alexander> enough, /already exist and have been used successfully for
    Alexander> years/ in the first group of languages he threw out.

I find nothing particularly troublesome about this aspect of the article.
There needs to be research before ideas can be put into practical usage.
How would we know we needed frameworks if someone hadn't done the research
and demonstrated its usefulness?  He may have ignored Haskell, et al as
research languages.  That doesn't mean he didn't consider the novel ideas
those languages explore useful, just that he didn't think they have the
proper set of non-research features necessary to make them commercially
appealing at this time.

Skip Montanaro | http://www.mojam.com/
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