Re: Flamebait if I ever saw it

Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On 2007-10-05 14:32:39 -0400, tumbling toad said:
Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
What is the traffic to comp.lang.functional?

What does c.l.f have to do with ML-style pattern matching?

comp.lang.functional is where discussion of *ml belongs

OCaml is discussed on the caml-list (copied to fa.caml). Haskell on the
haskell-cafe. F# on their mailing list and hub.

Asserting that *ml style pattern matching is some sort of standard is a
joke,

The core concept has been adopted by many different languages.

since you have to have a large number of users for something to
be a de facto standard, and *ml does not have a large number of users.

In total, those languages have far more users than Common Lisp.

Reality: many more people use common lisp than all the functional
languages *combined*.

JavaScript?

You'll do anything to change the subject

The functional language JavaScript sold 90x as many books in Q2 2007 than
Lisp. Your claim that Lisp is more popular is absurd.

JavaScript is weakly typed, and dynamic - now you're
championing it as a functional language in the same breath as *ml.

Did you mean to claim that Lisp is more popular than all statically typed
languages then?

The whole discussion is whether *ml style pattern matching is popular

Your statement about Lisp being more popular than all functional languages
combined seemed irrelevant to ML-style pattern matching.

Javascript users do *not* hang out in comp.lang.functional.

Indeed, nobody hangs out in c.l.f.

They have their own newsgroup that actually gets some traffic.

Like OCaml, Haskell, F# and Scala then.

For you 'functional' always meant pure functional, with
strong static typing.

Neither OCaml nor F# are pure functional languages.

This is really exactly the kind of misinformation that I was referring to
before. You clearly have no idea what other functional languages are out
there or what pattern matching is but you're making gross sweeping
statements about their popularity and capabilities without ever having
visited their discussion forums. I really do recommend you go and have a
look. There are lots of awesome functional programming languages available
these days and there is absolutely no reason to restrict yourself to Lisp.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
.

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