Actually this afternoon I was talking with my colleagues here at AXANT about the discussion pending over tail recursion elimination that is proceeding around Python, so they wanted me to post about that.
But, as I think that functional programming doesn’t really have to be embedded inside python if we don’t need it, I don’t really want to talk about that! (I’m not going to talk about that, so please, leave this post now, because I won’t say a word!) Usually I think about functional programming as a good tool to implement generic programming and also Tail recursion elimination can be an optimization inside compiled languages where a loop costs less than a function call as it is just an integer increment, and even so on modern architectures this might not be true, probably on Python it might even be worse.
In Python performing a function call requires: performing a function call (off course…), and iterating on something requires: incrementing an iterator (off course again?), which means performing a function call. So both would cost the same, but I think that probably function calls are best optimized than iterator incrementation inside CPython as the first is implemented in pure C while the second is mostly performed in python itself. Anyway the complexity of the algorithm from which you are eliminating tail recursion doesn’t change at all, so it isn’t a real optimization.
Fine, I ended talking about tail recursion elimination even if I didn’t want to!
Time for the real post!
This evening while surfing around the web I found an interesting consideration that makes me hope that for the future computer science might not be in the hands of business people as much as I think. In the recent years it seemed that for business people Ruby was becoming the new Java, every company thought that it could solve all its problems by just switching to it. All the interest around Ruby was confirmed by the fact that In the 2005 O’Reilly reported that Ruby books sales where up by around a 1500%, looking again at the same report now for 2008 it seems that Ruby hype is fading away (look at ObjC increment! Might that be cause of iPhone? Uhm, I think that Java will see something like that cause of Android launch).
This is making me think that maybe in the future we will be able to use Ruby for what it is and where it better behaves, instead of trying to make everything with it without being able to tell to our customers that “it isn’t a good idea” as it would receive as the only response that TechCrunch reported that “random name company” had increased its income by using Ruby. (I’m still trying to understand how it is possible that they usually don’t realize that “random name company” increased its income probably cause of what they did by using Ruby, not by the fact of using Ruby itself)
Maybe some day Italian companies will stop trying to take decisions about their IT infrastructure using stock market values and will start to realize that using Drupal, Plone or even Django might be a better solution than spending thousands of euros in implementing their own CMS from scratch using RoR just because they wanted to use RoR (At least please use Railfrog or something like that if you really want RoR!). Software development languages and frameworks should be the tool to achieve your target, not the target itself. I’m looking forward to the future or to the nearest sniper rifles shop.
