Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tpetricek 4142 days ago
Can I please quote your debating which particular brand of natural spring water should be given to millions of people who are thirsty in the desert when I get a chance :-)? It is a great summary of the problem with functional programming.

As a person with academic background interested in real-world FP (using F# in my case), this is exactly why I'm not very enthusiastic about most functional programming papers that appear in conferences like ICFP - they might be solving fun problems, but I'm not convinced they are problems that actually matter if we're going to ignore the main issue.

I think interesting functional libraries that demonstrate how to apply FP to some interesting problem can help here - for example, the paper on financial DSLs (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...) or the original paper on Functional Reactive Programming (http://conal.net/papers/icfp97/).
2 comments
jordwalke 4142 days ago
No need to ask permission to quote me, but thanks for asking anyways. I definitely agree that shifting focus towards industrial use cases is what we need.
link
tpetricek 4142 days ago
I guess it's more difficult than shifting the focus towards industrial use cases. Industrial use cases are a great thing, but it is something that the industry has to provide :-) (we tried to do something like that for F# here: http://manning.com/petricek2 (sorry for a shameless plug!)).

But many people contributing to functional programming (in one way or another) are in academia. They are not the best people to contribute industrial case studies - but I think there is still a lot to be done there too! The nice thing about the FRP paper is that it is really just a fun (and very simple and somewhat impractical) example, but it is nice inspiration showing (what was back then) a novel use of functional programming. Some of the more recent academic work around FP lacks this kind of creativity...

link
justincormack 4142 days ago
The financial DSL paper is a good example as although it was Haskell based, Jane Street eventually chose OCaml for production.
link