[clean-list] Clean in the Real World

Bill Wood billwood42@comcast.net
Thu, 4 Dec 2003 22:34:20 -0700


I have a question about Clean -- Is it ready for prime time?

More specifically:

1) Has Clean been used successfully for large, deployed,  production-grade
    applications?

2) How difficult is it to get a programming group experienced in, say, C,
    Pascal and Assembler to get up-to-speed with Clean?
    -- How expensive in training and ramp-up time?

3) How does Clean code compare in speed and memory use with imperative
    languages?

4) How great is the "distance" between Clean code designed for clarity and
    Clean code designed for performance?
    -- "academic" versus "real" code?

5) How severe is the overhead for the Foreign Function Interface (e.g.,
    htoclean)?

6) Would anyone recommend using Clean to handle complex logic involving access
    to a multi-gigabyte database, in a transaction processing environment?

I like the idea of using an FP language for my application -- I think it has 
many of the characteristics usually touted of OOP, and I think the functional 
model is simpler and more robust.  But if I'm going to sell the idea to 
management, I need a really good, defensible story.  I appreciate any insight 
anyone can provide.  If you don't want to consume bandwidth, reply directly 
to me.

Many thanks,

 -- Bill Wood
    bill.wood@acm.org