Why functional Python matters

[synthespian]

Alexander Schmolck wrote:
> Dave Benjamin <ramen at lackingtalent.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>The next thing I read will probably not surprise you if you have ever done a
>>Google search on functional programming. It was David Mertz's "Charming
>>Python" series on IBM's DeveloperWorks. His papers were not easy to digest
>>in one sitting, but I made a great effort to understand them and apply the
>>techniques he described. At this point, I should mention that I was still
>>programming only in PHP!
> 
> 
> I think your life might be much happier if you just went to
> http://www.drscheme.org/, dowloaded Dr Scheme and used *that* for
> webdevelopment. Then you can use a real functional programming language and
> read books by people who actually have a real clue about functional
> programming (there is lots of *excellent* material available on-line and for
> free, like SICP and HTDP, the latter uses Dr Scheme -- also have a look at
> http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2001/Lectures/). Why settle for some
> second-rate immitation? [1]
> 
> (Dr Scheme *does* have web libraries, I've never used them but I'd suspect
> they shouldn't be too bad, because they seem to have hit on trick of using
> webdevelopment as application domain to bring things like continuations to the
> unwashed masses (viz. their sophomores) :).
> 
  Hahaha...

  The OP might also be interested, then, in the Clean language. This is 
haskell-like, but with modifications in the type system (combines static 
/and/ dynamic typing and has destructive updates [1]), to improve 
performance (it compiles). Some issues remain in what regards exception 
handling, it seems (for pretty much the same reasons that they remain in 
haskell, probably. I'm no expert on FP, so I might be wrong).
  It was developed by serious people in the FP research community, but 
it is intended to be used in the "real" world. They have an IDE writen 
in Clean, I/O libraries, and even a graphics Game library! So, they mean 
what they say.
  Licensed under the LGPL. IDE for win32 only (for now).


home page:
http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/

some libraries: 
http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/About_Clean/page_modified/page_modified.html

foldoc (kind of useless, too outdated)
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?Clean

Regs

Henry

[1] "Clean is the only functional language in the world which offers 
/uniqueness typing/. This type system makes it possible in a pure 
functional language to incorporate destructive updates of arbitrary data 
structures (including arrays) and to make direct interfaces to the 
outside imperative world. The type system makes it possible to develop 
efficient applications."