re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]

[gbuday at gmail.com (Gergely Buday)]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:

> Is there participation on this list from the (hopefully larger number of)
> CMU instructors who are teaching people to use safer languages in the first
> place ?

May anybody not from CMU enter the discussion about safer languages? ;-)

I'm in favor of SML, as it has a number of implementations (some of
them comparable to C in speed)  and a formal definition ("well-typed
programs do not go wrong") + a standard library.

But I do see it's hard to push it in industry. Managers like "industry
best practice" so that they need not take risk. Or, better say, they
take the risks everybody else takes just probably are not aware of
this.

> From the human resources point of view it's not that easy to find
experienced sml programmers as there are very few companies who employ
such creatures. Vicious circle, you know.

Regarding the programming environment and libraries: it's just not a
research act to develop such things for sml anymore, so academics will
not pursue it. I've heard of an NSF infrastructure grant to develop
eclipse plugin for sml, though. Industry has not catched upon yet, nor
the OSS community.

And, just as an aside: I've heard a story that some cs celebrity
(Dijkstra?) once coined some conditions for a programming language to
be successful. The last clause was "IBM should love it". Yep, we've
seen this with Java. Anybody from IBM?

- Gergely