Lambda the Ultimate

Not so obvious... ;) You should look at "A Theory of Objects" by Martin Abadi and Luca Cardelli.

I'm not offended, just disappointed. I feel that I have always made objective arguments for Haskell's way of doing things, and fanatics are not known for their objectivity. If I come across as a fanatic, I must be doing something wrong.

But Frank, what gave you the idea that I was referring to you?

Who else could it be? I am the most vocal advocate of Haskell here, though I recognize that there are also other Haskell users and fans on LtU.

I really should have used the word "fan" and not "fanatic."

The main point in my original post, if any, was "We try to keep an open mind, and to discuss the differences between the various languages, paradigms and techniques carefully and unemotionally."

I certainly think you contributions are informative and helpful.

By the way, I am a newbie Haskell fan(atic) myself. I am not that vocal about it since I am very much aware of the fact that I am far from being a Haskell expert.

For what it's worth, I discovered this site when doing a Web Search for "Lambda Calculus" when I had just started learning Haskell. At the time I had the impression that the site was primarily about functional programming languages in general, but I now know better - even if it usually Ehud waxing lyrical about Ada. :-)

you have criticised it sometimes, too.

i think maybe there's a communication problem here. fanatic need not mean you are a crazed maniac - it can be used in casual conversation to mean little more than that someone believes a certain subject important (and i think it's fair to say that you think type theory is an important part of language design!).

alternatively, consider yourself "collateral damage". even innocents suffer in wars - especially religious wars - and sometimes the "typing debate" seems to be a religious war. i suspect that the dynamic army use perl for encrypted communications, while the static army throw meaningless words into their communications, causing runtime errors in the opponent's parsers...

Maybe its the whole idea of PL theory is associated with functional languages which is associated with Lisp. I'm just grasping as straws to understand the claim of this being a lisp site.

I don't like people to think I associate with languages like that. I prefer the more respectable ones. :)

Thanks for the book tip I'll check it out.

Coming out of lurkdom for an AOL

Actually two of the things that quite amaze me about Lambda the Ultimate as a forum is that it manages to:

1. Have such a high signal to noise ratio, and
2. Be as language neutral as it is.

I'm not sure that I know of anyone who I would describe as "language neutral", I guess there are people who are more open minded with respect to programming languages than others. However, in pretty much all the other online forums that I've visited, people seem to be unable to have rational discussions about language features, advantages, disadvantages and all the rest.

So, in summary, thanks Ehud for setting this up and thanks to all the active posters who make this weblog so interesting to read. I've been stimulated to learn about languages I wouldn't have thought to investigate before (Haskell (I'm still trying to get monads entirely sorted out in my head), Ada to name just two).