[bitc-dev] White space

[wren ng thornton]

Ben Kloosterman wrote:
> I would be cautious with BitC  , firstly the name but also when the audience
> will be embedded , driver and system developers which is very much C and
> C++. 

Again, embedded programming has a large following in the functional 
programming community--- especially distributed embedded programming.

Just to pick a glaring example: Erlang, designed by Ericsson for 
distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. 
Erlang is now one of the most popular functional languages in its own 
right, even outside of programming cellphones.

To say nothing of recent wireless sensor network projects like Flask[1] 
which is based on functional reactive programming, or DSN[2] which is 
based on Datalog (and logic programming isn't that different than 
functional programming). Let alone a certain inventor of BitC ;)

[1] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mainland/projects/flask/
[2] http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/dsn/


> For many of the audience functional programming is
> already a difficult leap  , go gentle ,  a lot of programmers out there  are
> not researchers or even have a degree and it took years for many to go from
> VB to VB.NET and grasp some OO concepts . 

If VB programmers were the intended audience, then I would agree. 
However, given how popular functional programming already is in the 
embedded world, as well the number of functional programmers working on 
systems development, I cannot help but attribute your bias to the same 
C/C++ jingoism I hear spouted every time a new language shows up which 
corrects the faulty designs of the 1970s.

Supposedly Java would never amount to anything because automatic garbage 
collection was too inefficient for "real" programmers; now Java is 
considered isomorphic to C++. Supposedly Ruby would never amount to 
anything because it uses an object model based off Smalltalk instead of 
struct-based programming in C. Before Ruby, much the same was said about 
Python. Now, Python's considered isomorphic to Java. Meanwhile, such 
outre languages as Erlang, Haskell, and Scala are doing just fine for 
themselves. At least one in 230 IT jobs in the UK is using one of those 
three frightening languages[3].

Yes, BitC should try to go gently on its intended audience. I could be 
wrong, but I don't get the impression that audience is programmers 
who've never moved beyond C++.

[3] 
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cxumk/haskell_jobs_as_proportion_of_total_uk_it_jobs/

-- 
Live well,
~wren