People will take any opportunity to talk about what they know. Software engineers are like athletes, they need their ego's stroked more often than they should. And if no else will do it, well they might as well do it themselves. At least peacocks are more honest and upfront when they do it.
Speaking of which, who want to talk about incredibly fast methods of protein folding, just re- this comment... kiddin'. Please don't.
What's the point of the story? Don't get it. Do you agree with Oliver's statement, or do you think people should have talked more about sudoku solvers?
I think that we need mind-blowing sudoku solvers where Alonzo-Church-oriented minds shows the more Turing-Machine-inclined fellas what kind of terseness you can achieve with functional programmming (simple problems are the best to explain features of a programming paradigm), and I also believe that we need webservers that go beyond 10k simultaneous connections while still being simple and maintanable and modular (i.e., real life functional programming).
I just find that that thread shows perfectly how the functional programming folks perceive themselves as not having a real killer application for what they believe is a paradigm that suits a certain class of problems like a glove. "Haskell is the language that everybody talks about [like I am doing here :-)], but nobody uses" said Simon Peyton-Jones. There are only a few industrial applications of FP, I am thinking of the trading firm Jane Street and the security company galois.com . It didn't take off yet, I'd say.
But I don't want this thread to replicate that troll -- i.e. becaming an Emacs Vs Vim kind of discussion. I just believe that the thread linked above well reflects a situation deeply rooted in the programming community.
Well, the thread did not shift to "webservers", it shifted on the topic "well, Sudoku solvers are nice, but were are the real world Alonzo-Church style programs, and why are we functional types living off of C and the like for most of real world use?
Speaking of which, who want to talk about incredibly fast methods of protein folding, just re- this comment... kiddin'. Please don't.