XSLT <xsl:variable> Element

[AtW]

Forth is the language used in most devices in the world... Most telephone systems either use functional programming or are in a constant state of being debugged. Lots of aerospace, mostly ISVV.

How many jobs advertised on jobserve to do work mainly with a functional language (not an optional extra)?

People who still use Forth are stuck with it - yet another reason to use proper language that at least can be ported fairly easily without mind**** of immense proportions.

[NickFitz]

How many jobs advertised on jobserve to do work mainly with a functional language (not an optional extra)?

People who still use Forth are stuck with it - yet another reason to use proper language that at least can be ported fairly easily without mind**** of immense proportions.

Forth is the easiest language in the world to port/implement - I know, I implemented it from scratch on the Atari ST in 68000 assembly language, and later ported it to the Amiga. (I've also implemented it on the PDP-11/34A and Acorn Archimedes.) That's one of the reasons it's so widely deployed: in order to bring Forth up on a new system you only need a couple of hundred lines of assembler, if that, and you're away.

[AtW]

That's one of the reasons it's so widely deployed

How many jobs require Forth as primary working language?

How many jobs require any functional language as primary working language?

"Functional" languages are the COBOLs of the world!

[d000hg]

LOTS of people understand functional languages. If you're bright and taught about them right, it's not too hard. But by the time many people get to university, they already think they know what 'programming' is and therefore functional languages seem like an alien way and are fought against.

If you look at the top percentiles of programmers (not software developers) many know functional programming and use it. But typical developers aren't bright enough which makes it very hard for a typical project to use it.

And as for impact of functional programming on real life software:

Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable

And of course, you wouldn't be forgetting that C# itself already has several functional aspects and has grown in that direction quite a lot over time?

[AtW]

And of course, you wouldn't be forgetting that C# itself already has several functional aspects and has grown in that direction quite a lot over time?

I have no problem with language having some "functional" elements - what I have a problem with is with language that does not allow common decades proven programming approach to work, ie: no proper loops, no variables etc etc, it's obvious ffs!

I'd troll you a bit more but I am back home eating nice meal so I'll leave trolling to sasguru's sockies

[threaded]

I have no problem with language having some "functional" elements - what I have a problem with is with language that does not allow common decades proven programming approach to work, ie: no proper loops, no variables etc etc, it's obvious ffs!

I'd troll you a bit more but I am back home eating nice meal so I'll leave trolling to sasguru's sockies

Hmm, if you knew functional programming you might well look at the decades of wheel reinvention, bug fixing and massive test teams as glaring examples of why imperative programming is exactly the wrong way to try and build anything.

[d000hg]

what I have a problem with is with language that does not allow common decades proven programming approach to work, ie: no proper loops, no variables etc etc, it's obvious ffs!

Obvious to you because you were brought up to believe procedural languages were the 'right way', or because you can't understand anything which doesn't directly map to how the CPU works. To people brought up with a training in algorithms instead of hacking code in C, functional programming is elegant and far easier to use.

If you insist on only thinking of programming in terms of bits and bytes and registers, then you're missing the point that computer science isn't about such things. The CPU is a way to run your algorithms, not the thing that has to shape how they are designed.
Like how we count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers... it doesn't mean it's the best or only way to count.

[NickFitz]

i have no problem with language having some "functional" elements - what i have a problem with is with language that does not allow common decades proven programming approach to work, ie: No proper loops, no variables etc etc, it's all i know!

ftfy

[suityou01]

surely xslt is a declarative language and hence not comparible with functional languages

[NickFitz]

surely xslt is a declarative language and hence not comparible with functional languages

Functional languages are a subset of declarative languages. XSLT (by which most people still mean XSLT 1.0) doesn't appear to exhibit the characteristics of a functional language, in that it is a declarative language and therefore has no need to seem to be a member of a subset of the set of languages to which it belongs; however, given that it belongs to a superset of such languages, it is of course capable of being used as a functional language, as XSLT maven Dimitre Novatchev demonstrated back in 2001 with FXSL, "The functional programming library for XSLT"

"Until now it was believed that although XSLT is based on functional programming ideas, it is not as yet a full functional programming language, as it lacks the ability to treat functions as a first-class data type. Based on numerous concrete XSLT implementations of some of the major functional programming design patterns, including some of the most generic list-processing and tree-processing functions, this article provides ample proof that XSLT is in fact a full-fledged functional programming language. The presented code forms the base of a first XSLT functional programming library. It is emphasized that a decision to include higher-order functions support in XPath 2.0 will make functional programming in XSLT even more straightforward, natural and convenient."