[mercury-users] Arguments against Mercury usage??
Jonathan Morgan
jonmmorgan at gmail.com
Wed Oct 18 16:43:59 AEST 2006
On 18/10/06, Jörg Roman Rudnick <joerg.rudnick at t-online.de> wrote:
> 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...)
Mercury has been under development for over ten years - I would not
call that an early development stage (on the other hand, I'm not sure
that I would have wanted to use it five years ago).
> 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 is powerful and general, but may not be appropriate for any
given domain. It is still more in the domain of early adopters and
experimenters than large-scale business.
> + Mercury was mentioned to have a steep learning curve, making it not
> the first choice in introduction to logic programming
But a better choice for larger applications (e.g. in business).
> + the type class system still seems to need some time...
But is usable for many (most?) applications.
> + for network connectivity, I had to extemporize a TCP socket(!) - not
> the thing `ordinary' people like, I assume... ;-)
Any small language is unlikely to have a large library base. There
are some wrappers for various things, but only those that people
choose to write and contribute (look in extras).
> + if the mode for vi and the Prolog mode for Emacs don't count, there
> seems to be nothing like an IDE...
Not much of a loss.
> + ... 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?
While not speaking for them, the developers of Mercury are academics,
not marketers. By and large, my guess is that people who are really
interested in functional and logic programming would have been able to
discover Mercury.
Jon
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