Twist and perversion. Was: Software bugs aren't inevitable

[Steven D'Aprano]

This conversation is rapidly approaching flame-war territory. Just a few
comments before I hope we can put this to bed.

On Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:39:35 +0200, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:

> Now go, and talk to some FP people before accusing them of being *so*
> sectarian. Your supposition that they claim that FP is always better is
> unjustified. Were I more aggressive, I would say: 'sheer nonsense'.
> I would not say - as you did - a 'ludicrous sophistry', because it is
> not ludicrous. Quite sad, in fact...

I work with some people who are absolutely infatuated with functional
programming. I can assure you that in my experience, at least some FP
folks *do* say that it is always better. Need I point out that they are
invariably extremely bright, highly educated, academically minded, and
utterly inexperienced with the commercial and practical realities of
real-world development?

I say that as somebody who is fascinated by the concepts of FP, and would
like to see Python at least keep the existing functional programming
constructs, if not expand them. But my reason for doing so is that there
are no magic bullets, not FP, not generators, OO, or any one of a hundred
other programming patterns. The more tools you have, the more likely you
will find one that works for your particular problem.


-- 
Steven.