Re: [xml-dev] Using XML (or JSON) for inter-thread communication

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Andrew Welch scripsit:

> >> As far as I know, as we all move towards functional programming we
> >> won't have to worry too much about it as it gets taken care of for
> >> us.
> >
> > Good luck with that.
>
> Is that not the case?

Disclaimer:  I'm not a Haskell programmer, so I don't have a deep
understanding of what I'm saying here.

The virtue of pure functional programming languages is that when you get
your code to compile, it's almost certain to work right.  The problems
are twofold: when your program does not compile, it's often not easy to
figure out just why; and when your program has terrible performance, as
it often will if you write it naively, it's not clear what to do to fix
it.  Both of these are symptoms of the same disconnect: what your code
*appears* to be doing is not at all what the graph reduction machine
inside is *actually* doing.

> Ah ok... shame you didn't make it first, you could've made a fortune
> :)

Eh, working for traders is not the way to a restful life.

-- 
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"
                John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>