Re: OO-XQ-OO: to do or not to do

[Liam R E Quin]

On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 19:57 +0100, James Fuller wrote:
>  ... if anyone has examples of large scale fp
> development I would like to hear about it

Last I heard (a few years ago) ebay had over a million
lines of XSLT (4 million? not sure). But whether that's a
good example is another matter. Maybe most of it is an
implementation of character-to-code-point with a very
large xslt:choose :-) :-)

>  (I know amazon had a
> significant team earlier on and that there are a lots of gov/mil work
> with fp but have yet to see commercial enterprise embrace)

Part of that I think, especially in large US projects, is a
tendency to use relatively low-level programmers and consultants,
where Java means they do less damage than in C, or, worse, C++...

Another part is that some functional languages (just as with
imperative languages) are much better equipped for large
projects than others.

I think also some fp techniques have made it into mainstream
programmer thinking even in the procedural world -- e.g.
map and apply -- and hybrid languages that de-emphasise
the functional aspects are quite popular too (Perl, for
example, spells Lambda as "sub"...but does have higher
order functions, map, apply, and probably combinators :-) )

One or the strengths of XSLT is that people who do not think
of themselves as programmers can happily get their heads round it.
XQuery is more up-front about being a programming language,
with its fussier syntax, but it still does have a lot of that
strength, and I suspect a lot of people use it, just as they
use SQL, without ever thinking of it as "declarative".

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org