Re: Receptive Tool Vendors (was: Re: [Caml-list] Jihad)

["Krishnaswami, Neel" <neelk@cswcasa.com>]

David Fox [mailto:dsfox@cogsci.ucsd.edu] wrote:
> "Eric Newhuis" <enew@bigfoot.com> writes:
> > 
> > Am I wrong?  What is the current state of functional 
> > programming language acceptance?
> 
> I would say it is low world wide.  As a matter of fact, many of the
> engineers in the U.S. who are unaware of functional programming are
> foreigners!  I'm being facetious, but I think that injecting
> nationality into this discussion is unhelpful and annoying.

Locale matters somewhat, I'd think. I say this because I live in
Boston, and the MIT/Lisp connection is somewhat felt even now. 
Mostly, in the sense that startups are able to get ahold of Lisp
hackers who gripe about how defective Java is. :/ Presumably the 
same is true in and around Stanford. I guess the Lelisp effort 
morphed into Caml, so perhaps the situation is better in France?
 
Incidentally, does anyone have a pointer to how extensional 
polymorphism enables typesafe marshalling? I have to confess
that I can't figure that out -- how would I use it to go about 
writing a safe equivalent of Lisp's READ function? 

--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com
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