A Discipline of Programming by E.W. Dijkstra (1975)

I found this this morning in my Windows Updater log :

"
Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista (KB960714)

Installation date: 12/18/2008 3:01 AM
"

Yes functional languages are very much at odds with many things, that's why their acceptance is limited, despite many obvious advantages, which revolve the fact that's it's extremely difficult to write bugs with them. On the other hands they are well suited to other domains, such as compilers, document processing (XSLT for example), and all sorts of data processing, i.e. in the financial engineering sector.

Their shortcomings are addressed in different ways : introducing state in them and transforming them into hybrid languages, for example. This bastardization process is exemplified by Microsoft's F# project.

On the other hands, languages like Haskell try to deal with state in a clean, more theoretical, by incorporating side effects into the typing system.

I agree about Darth Vader vs a Rodeo clown. By the way, who would win a fight ?

+1 for that.

I love functional programming but let's face it, computers are state machines and you cannot really program them without understanding how programs modify their state. Hoare. Dijkstra. Read them. Embrace them. Feel the pain of bending your mind around them.

There are no two things more opposite to each other than OOP and functional programming. Functional programming is about FUNCTIONS, which are those that return a value that is completely determined by their arguments, not depending on, or modifying, any state. OOP is all about calling METHODS, which have values that are determined by both the arguments and the state of the object they're called on, and often are meant to modify that state.

"A Discipline of Programming" is more specifically, about how to write programs that are correct by construction, than it is about how to prove that already written programs are correct.

IMHO what I understand of 30 years of history of the software industry, and my experiences of formal methods and programming language theory in the research world on the one hand, and real-world professional software development on the other hand, validate everything that's in this book.

Systematically buying everything you read new and hardcover is pretty uncommon anyways, except maybe for people who have amounts of disposable income that make the convenience factor the only that counts anyway.

Reading paperback, pocket-book and other discounted editions, buying used books on peer-to-peer marketplaces, borrowing from a library, from a friend, your spouse, of from your parent's bookshelf, all these are not taken into account. If we divide that value of each book that I've read in my life, by the total number of people who've read that particular physical book too, and take the average, we're most definitely in the sub-$1 area, even counting all of the technical and textbook stuff.