Here are some choice-quotes that are one of {insightful, controversial, arguable}:<br><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced"><br>
Starting with my favorite quote ;):<br>
<br>
"T</font><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">he ability to operate on the program as data is basic to the provision of <br> many desirable utilities, e.g. the Boyer-Moore theorem prover, and the program <br>
transformation work that was based on Hope, not to mention a compiler. <br> It seems unfortunate that recent functional languages are heteroousian in the <br> sense that they are defined in the usual computer scientist's way of specifying <br>
a syntax, and not specifying a representation of a program as a <br> data-structure. This is a manifestation of the besetting vice of computer <br> scientists - they will insist in locking up goodies in a black box..."<br>
<br>On Lisp:<br></font><br><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">"There is a danger that this perspective will adversely affect the design of a <br> language from the user's point of view. The most extreme case is that of LISP, <br>
which may be seen as a very flawed implementation of the Lambda Calculus, <br> which preserves the notation rather closely."<br><br>On Haskell syntax:<br><br>"</font><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">However, if the use of upper case is not permitted for <br>
ordinary variables a conflict arises between the language conventions and the <br> conventions of mathematics,...."<br>"</font><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">Haskell is also in conflict with established programming conventions in that <br>
it it uses double colon to denote membership of a type (e.g. x::Int) rather <br> than the single colon that those millions of existing programmers will be <br> familiar with,.."<br></font><br><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">On Haskell arrays:<br>
<br>"</font><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">The Haskell array operation is a related construct, from which a instances of <br> the application of the POP-11 newarray could be implemented - it does however <br>
suffer from one practical draw-back, namely it takes an association list as <br> argument, which makes it inefficient as a means of memoising a function, <br> unless a very smart compiler is used."<br><br>On purity:<br>
<br>"</font><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced">I want a language that is not purely functional because functional <br> languages do not reflect the basic structure of computers. If you want to <br> write a matrix inversion algorithm it will be hard to do it efficiently <br>
without assignment."</font><br><font class="fixed_width" face="Courier, Monospaced"><br></font>Matt<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Matt Morrow <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:moonpatio@gmail.com">moonpatio@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">This is interesting (and from 1990):<br><br><a href="http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.lang.functional/msg/655bb7bbd0fd8586" target="_blank">http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.lang.functional/msg/655bb7bbd0fd8586</a><br>
<br>(Not sure if this is well-known. It seems like it either is, or it should be. Either way, I just stumbled across it.)<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>