Unofficial wish list status.(Jul 2008)

[Robert Fraser]

Me Here Wrote:
> Web servers and other IO-bound processes are *not* the target of
> multithreading.

How do functional programming styles apply better to I/O-bound systems? 
I couldn't imagine writing a query processor using monads for all I/O.

Functional programming works well for a subset of applications which 
require concurrency. The question is: is this subset large enough to justify 
designing a language's concurrency support around this paradigm? Is it 
large enough to justify forcing additional language constructs (const) for 
applications that don't use this paradigm to handle their concurrency? For 
non-concurrent applications?

Of course, there are other arguments for a const system (static checking 
of interfaces, etc.) But what other major new statically-typed languages 
(besides D) have such a system? Java mostly threw it out (there's final 
fields & what not). C-pound threw out even more of it. I ahve the same 
feelings towards const-as-interface as I do towards checked exceptions: 
sounds great on paper, but ends up wasting the developer's time.

(apologies for the web interface; @ work)