Does functional programming work?

[retard]

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:00:53 -0500, bearophile wrote:

> yigal chripun:
> The Windows95 OS may be worse, but the GUI of XP was much more refined
> and usable for non-guru-level users. Things are slowly changing, as
> Ubuntu GUI gets a bit better, it eventually will become about as good as
> Windows95 GUI or better :-)

Ha, oh really? The fact is, all major desktop environments have their 
usability and technical issues. Ubuntu is a rather small player in this 
game. For instance Apple has been selling Macs really aggressively. KDE4 
is also becoming a serious alternative - Qt *is* very powerful (if not 
best) toolkit for building modern desktop applications.

Now that many intranet and internet applications are being built on web 
(2.0) platform, the choice of OS shouldn't matter. But in reality many 
intranet apps still require IE 6 and ActiveX. Some internet apps only 
work in internet explorer 6 or 7 (wine + unofficial ie packs help in 
this, of course). No matter how good the competitive products are and how 
little they cost (they're free as in beer, as everyone here might know), 
it will take tens of years for people and industries to switch. Even if 
Microsoft had died some years ago and WinXP was the latest windows 
release for some unknown reason, probably the majority (>50% of users) 
would start using alternative OSes in 2030, definitely no sooner.

> Most people don't care of a better kernel if
> the OS interface forces you to edit small text files spread everywhere
> that risk breaking your system at each little error :o)

Most people are dumb as a rock. They think you need MS Office Word for 
writing e-mails. They know that IE6 = internet = computer = email = 
facebook = web = google = browser = virus = something. They buy stuff 
because a salesman tells them to. Usually the salesman recommends buying 
latest Windows, MS Office Pro, Adobe Photoshop, and other interesting 
stuff like the most expensive anti-virus software available when a 
clueless casual user asks anything.

> Compared to D Java is also much safer than D, its compiler gives better
> error messages, its GCs are way better, its semantics is better defined
> and better enforced, HotSpot is better than even LDC with LLVM and can
> lead to faster programs, Java as language is simpler to learn and to
> use, you can run it in a browser, it's simpler to add/change parts to a
> Java program at runtime, its reflection is better, etc. I like D more,
> but Java is not bad.

Don't forget aspectj and other aspect frameworks, interoperatibility with 
other jvm languages.

> Regarding Smalltalk, its syntax is weird for people that come from
> C/C++

I claim that currently this is the main reason for people not adopting 
Smalltalk or any other language. Even if smalltalk was 50% faster than C+
+ and 100% safer, there would be legions of morons how still want to 
stick with C++ or C when building end-user GUI applications. Mainstream 
programmers don't want to use their brain - they're happy with the C 
family syntax and refuse to learn any other syntax. After all, with the 
common syntax you can more or less easily use c,c++,c#,d,java,scala,php, 
and many less known languages. Most mainstream programmers also only know 
the parts of these languages that they all share - a nice imperative 
dialect which is very handy for writing ugly, buggy, and badly performing 
business code.