[mercury-users] Arguments against Mercury usage??

[Jörg Roman Rudnick]

Dear experienced ones in Mercury,


I am afraid this question has com several times at this mailing list, 
but I haven't found a discussion of it.

The head of the chair I am working at intends to hold a speech about 
past, present & future of logic and functional programming in front of 
business computing practitioners - I mean quite straight guys - and 
intends to mention Mercury.

Now I am in responsibility, and a question arises whether I did transfer 
some overly enthusiastic point of view; I am that strange kind of person 
feeling very comfortable at environments at early development stage and 
do not mind to take considerable risks at stepping into practical 
application. (Accordingly I did not perceive too many drawbacks of 
Mercury...)

So what can I tell safely to a person wanting to express something about 
Mercury but still stand on the safe side? What to consider right to 
prevent overly ambitious promises?

+ Mercury was mentioned to have a steep learning curve, making it not 
the first choice in introduction to logic programming
+ the type class system still seems to need some time...
+ for network connectivity, I had to extemporize a TCP socket(!) - not 
the thing `ordinary' people like, I assume... ;-)
+ if the mode for vi and the Prolog mode for Emacs don't count, there 
seems to be nothing like an IDE...
+ ... anything else??

Obviously, you declared Mercury to be a zero-version yet - what do you 
expect should be added so you would call it a one-version? You made 
almost no `advertisement' yet; Mercury is almost completely unknown in 
business - I guess you discussed the whole a lot and wisely chose to do 
so: What are your reasons?

What would you like people NOT to promise prematurely about Mercury - 
just to prevent tears and, even worse, undeserved bad press?


Not willing to step over the yellow line,

             Nick


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