Monday, August 23, 2010

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day:

"In the end, any program must manipulate state. A program that has no side effects whatsoever is a kind of black box. All you can tell is that the box gets hotter."

- Simon Peyton-Jones; Co-creator of the Haskell programming language.

2 comments:

Andreas Pauley said...

Cool, I sort of remember that presentation of his.

So what is your opinion regarding side-effects in programming languages?

Does it have practical value to try to remain free from side effects as much as possible, or is it a purely academical exercise?

julian_za said...

@Andreas

Without a doubt the less side effects you have to worry about the better.

It's also definitely not academic, especially, I speak as one who's more than once foolishly rolled a cache...