Does functional programming work?

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sun Jan 3 03:34:31 PST 2010


yigal chripun wrote:
> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
>> yigal chripun wrote:
>>> Have you ever actually used Smalltalk?? I have used it and it's the
>>> easiest language to use by far, having conditionals as methods of
>>> Boolean is much better, easier to read and more flexiable.
>>>
>>> The beauty of smalltalk is that you can easily add new "language"
>>> features in the library with little effort and they do not look
>>> foreign to the language. in fact, almost all of smalltalk is
>>> implemented in the library and it only has 5 actual keywords.
>>
>> What's your opinion, then, about why Smalltalk has failed to catch on?
> 
> That's a completely separate issue. Success of any product or idea depends on many aspects of which technical superiority is only one. I've used Smalltalk and it is most definitly superior to most other languages including D.  
> 
> Compare to cars - the most popular and successful design is that of the internal combustion engine yet it's the worst design in technical terms, there are more effecient and much cleaner designs.
> 
> compare to OSes - Unix died in the Unix wars and was replaced by a much worse system called windows which today has over 90% market share. Windows is by far the worst OS ever and yet this is the design that won. Technically speaking Linux today is much better and I enjoyed using it but ultimatly my main system today is windows 7 and not for technical reasons. 
> 
> Compare to Java - a mediocre language at best yet very popular and in fact I'd prefer to use Java over D too beacuse the fact that D is a (much) better langauge is a tiny aspect of productivity of a programmer. Java has a lot of amazing tools that support it and a lot of freely available libraries while in D we still can't have only one standard lib. 
> So while it's fun to play with D, for real stuff I'll prefer Java with eclipse and all the standardized libs that make my life that much more simple. 

You didn't answer the question. What's your opinion about why Smalltalk 
has failed to catch on?

Andrei



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