Re: FP tutorial for OO programmers

> You are being extremely unfair, and you know it.  What "fiasco"?  What
> "stupidities"?  Be glad John and (I believe) Emden are not reading
> netnews, otherwise a big, serious apology would be in order.  And by
> this I don't mean:

They can't ship a tarball of the webpages because of the copyright issues 
with the publisher. An API that I can't get in electronic form is absolutely 
useless. The Basis should be a living document not a dead tree that has been 
in production for way too long than it need to be.

They didn't need to publish a book. They need to get all the ML 
implementations on board and agree to stay in sync, which these days isn't 
the case. In fact an automated test suite that checked for compliance with 
some crappy HTML webpages would have been by far easier to get out the door 
into the real world and been far more useful. However, they went for the 
dead tree approach. In fact it seems the goal of the whole Basis exercise 
has been aimed at getting a book out the door rather than being useful. That 
at least is my perspective.

{stuff deleted}
> In short, I don't care if SML or Haskell or even OCaml or Clean or ...
> will die -- as long as some of the better ideas that went into their
> design make it into future languages and as long as the worst ideas
> survive as warnings for future designers.  In this sense the Algol
> analogy is probably true -- and no reason for being ashamed.

If you have that attitude then any seriously pragmatic developer will not 
dare bet a project on SML/NJ with every good rational reason not too. If you 
don't care about building a base, then why continue working and doing 
mantaince on SML? There are much more intellectually interesting problems to 
tackle. If it really is simply a fun hobby then fine. If it really is just a 
hobby then the owners should abandon control and move on. I suspect after 
the mythical "next offical release" happens that is exactly what will happen.

Anyway, you basically seem to agree with me about the philosophy of 
development that is being used and mostly agree with the long term outcomes 
of such a result. If SML/NJ developers are happy with the outcomes of SML 
becoming "the next Algol" then great.. I only want to make clear that in 
some ways Algol was a wild success by other metrics it was a complete failure.


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