[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Various presentations, schema concepts, etc.
* Rick JELLIFFE | | I am not so sure that functional programming is so bad: SQL is | basically a functional language is it not? No, like Matt said, SQL is declarative. The best-known functional programming languages at the moment are probably Standard ML and Haskell. | I suspect that the problem with functional programming is that it | changes the boundaries between what is hard and what is | straightforward too much. Personally, I think the problem is much simpler. It is not hyped and it requires people to change their way of thinking. Seeing how hard it is for programming languages with a non-C syntax (but similar concepts) to make it the outlook is not good for functional programming. Hype might change that, but there has been precious little of it so far. | XSLT's approach of allowing extensions (cheating) on a small and | targetted application domain seems to be pretty acceptable--it | forces you to use a different tool to solve the problems which (the | kinds of FP used in) XSLT is not great at. I see this as an argument for Lisp. XSLT with a Lisp-based syntax and proper integration with Lisp as a programming language would be an awesome XML processing tool. Performance would probably also be much better than with the current Java-based systems. For example, an RSS->HTML stylesheet fragment (forgetting namespaces for now): (template item (li nil (a (href (xpath link)) (xpath title)) (xpath description))) | I remember his suggestion, after working with functional programming | techiques (and liking them very much) was that perhaps they require | a too high level of abstraction for typical programmer (typically | trained programmers?), compared to procedural code (we are used to | assignment): I think this may very well be true. As Richard Gabriel observed, it seems that programmers tend to favour languages that do not require abstractions. And I think he was very likely right that abstractions are not the answer to everything. --Lars M. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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