[antlr-interest] ST 4.0 planning

[Raphael Reitzig]

Hi!

Although this is offtopic, I want to comment on this:

Actually, one workgroup at my university has developed a construct  
(called Katja) to introduce immutable values to Java to get all the  
advantages, mainly to be able to work with terms. It's rather cool  
once you get used to it.

I experienced the functional paradigma to be a useful teacher. It  
taught me to code _without_ hacky global stuff. It taught me the power  
and elegance of recursion. It even taught me when to avoid recursion  
at all costs ;)

Regards

Raphael

"Martin Probst" <mail at martin-probst.com> wrote (Thu Sep 11 10:53:42 2008):

>>> Do I give a rat's ass if my text is generated in a functional
>>> language? At the time, I
>>> was trying to implement automatically generated sequence numbers
>>> for things
>>> like test cases and symbols. It was far more difficult than it
>>> needed to be
>
>
>> I especially like your observation about languages. The design of the
>> language should not get in the way of getting common stuff done
>> (Prolog, F#,
>> ERLANG, etc.), without giving even more back for the effort (as do C+
>> +,
>> Java, C#, etc.).
>
> The point of languages like Erlang or Prolog is that they make
> different design tradeoffs than languages like Java or C#, and this
> leads to very compelling features, like the robustness and
> restartability (eh, not a word...) of Erlang micro-processes. Building
> in some "convenience features", like mutable variables, would
> completely taint the language.
>
> About functional languages: programming in a functional style is
> something you need to get used to, and it takes time. However many
> people find that programs written in a pure functional language have
> significantly less bugs, among other advantages. And in particular
> transformation problems are very amenable to such stuff.
>
> Something like a global, mutable counter variable might be a nice
> quick hack to get something done, but it fails on a lot of other
> levels, e.g. modularity, ability to test, potentially thread safety,
> and so on.
>
> I'd really recommend you to give this stuff some more time, it is
> actually useful and a good idea.
>
> Regards,
> /Martin
>
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