[clean-list] Clean in the Real World

Jean-Luc Delatre jld@club-internet.fr
Thu, 08 Jan 2004 09:00:54 +0100


Marco Kesseler a écrit :

>If I am to do _impure_ functional programming anyway, wouldn't it
> be better to use the full power of one of these languages, than be
> dealing with some "do" notation? For the impure parts, that is. You
> actually _can_ program elegantly in these other languages too (note that
> I did _not_ mention Cobol).

Overall, this is an interesting debate, at least it shows that the question is not settled yet.
Way beyond "elegance" considerations, and though I am not myself, in practice, using functional
languages, I think that the *real* underlying problematic is whether you can *prove* properties of
some piece of code (or even better "synthesize" some piece of code from various constraints).
I don't expect this to be feasible with impure languages for anything but toy examples while pure
languages leave us with that hope, at least in some (distant?) future.
Therefore monads are as good as any other mean to preserve referential transparency and may be
slightly better than uniqueness typing with respect to intelligibility of the code (ask Jerzy about
that ;-)

Cheers,

-- Jean-Luc Delatre
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