Do functional languages bring anything in the resolution of everyday business problems?
Are there any successful projects that have been implemented using a functional language (ideally with a published test case)?
+2
A:
One implementation of Perl 6, Pugs, is written in Haskell, but it has largely given way to the standard Rakudo Perl implementation.
Chris Lutz
2009-09-23 19:54:29
Why the downvote? Do you dislike Perl?
Chris Lutz
2009-09-24 19:04:47
Creating a language interpreter is hardly an "everyday business problem"; you yourself say Pugs isn't really a success but has been superseded by a conventional implementation.
Pete Kirkham
2009-10-02 11:09:08
They did fairly successfully implement Perl. They didn't stop the project because they failed to implement the language, they stopped because they didn't need two implementations, and the Parrot version was preferred.
Chris Lutz
2009-10-03 23:43:55
+2
A:
Friends of mine use Haskell every day to implement financial algorithms.
system PAUSE
2009-09-23 19:58:43
+2
A:
There was a talk at the Lang.NET conference about how they'd used F# to improve the performance of an insurance application, which is about as everyday as you can get. Silverlight video, WMV video. That said, most of the focus of that talk is on F#'s concurrency support, less on the idiomatically functional aspects of the language.
itowlson
2009-09-23 19:59:31
Video is ok, thanks. I was impressed by the comprarison in execution timings. I was less conviced by the 8 weeks training for a team to maintain this, but I guess it may be valuable in some situations. +1
iDevlop
2009-09-23 20:28:25
*laughter* Yes, she seemed far more blase about the cross-training costs than I would have been... but then I guess she was also being paid for giving the training...!
itowlson
2009-09-23 21:14:27
+6
A:
There are quite a few listed on Functional Programming in the Real World. From the site:
The main criterion for being real-world is that the program was written primarily to perform some task, not primarily to experiment with functional programming.
Bill the Lizard
2009-09-23 20:10:44
You got it, even if you made the question (which is no more a question) and the answer. Thanks to the other ones as well. Looks like I have some reading to do and opinions to revise.
iDevlop
2009-09-23 20:48:44
A:
Have you heard of Lisp machines before? The emacs editor also makes extensive use of Lisp.
Eric
2009-09-23 20:14:45
you may allready know this but Lisp isn't especially Functional. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29 You can program it using functional techniques, but the same can be said for most languages. Lisp is considered to be a multi paradigm language
chollida
2009-09-23 20:17:43
True, Lisp supports other paradigms, but I'd consider it primarily a functional language.
Eric
2009-09-23 21:37:06
+8
A:
The Xen hypervisor is at base, implemented in OCAML; and Erlang is deployed in ultra-high reliability telephony systems (the ones that have zero down-time over periods of years).
Steve Gilham
2009-09-23 20:29:07
+2
A:
Xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell.
Facebook's chat feature makes heavy use of Erlang. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note%5Fid=14218138919&id=9445547199&index=0
Himanshu
2009-10-01 01:22:38
A:
I would argue that the Lotus Notes formula language is an example of a widely used real world functional programming language.
Daniel Vaughan
2009-10-05 12:20:34