Re: [Caml-list] Re: productivity improvement

[Eray Ozkural <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>]

On Friday 12 July 2002 16:44, John Max Skaller wrote:
> Two major reasons.
>
>     (1) licence uncertainty
>     (2) lack of programmers
>
> Issue (2) will go away with time as use snowballs,
> it would help if Universities started teaching Ocaml instead
> of stupid OO languages like Java, or at least as well as.

Indeed. The industry wants OO, the industry thinks Java is the
ultimate OO language, they persuade clueless academics (who might as well 
think that choice of PL is irrelevant to understanding the theory), and
then they start teaching Java (and now C#) at the university.

The problem is that OO is *not* the best approach to programming.
OO is a kind of program conceptualization that might be of some
use in certain domains while failing miserably in majority of domains. That's 
why most of the "OO" code is iteration constructs and imperative nonsense, 
over and over again. I once told a colleague that 90% percent of the code we 
are writing in C++ is iterators. Nothing in the world could be more stupid 
than that.

Besides, C does not hold the crown of imperative languages, especially when it 
comes to demonstrating the basics of programming. Pascal does a much better 
job at that in my opinion, and Algol might even do better but nobody 
comprehends its prominence among imperative languages.

It is so amusing when "Software Engineers" find out that the overblown UML 
can't be used to model every kind of program.

Happy hacking,

-- 
Eray Ozkural <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
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