Factor Language Blog

Joel Spolsky is trying to explain why functional programming matters to mainstream programmers. I think he’s wasting his breath though – its hard to explain to a certified Struts engineer why copy and paste coding is bad. He makes a funny comment about Java’s anonymous inner classes being used as poor man’s closures:

If your programming language requires you to use functors, you’re not getting all the benefits of a modern programming environment. See if you can get some of your money back.

The irony is that we have a company (IntelliJ or whatever they’re called these days) whose entire business model is based around selling nothing more than a 400$ text editor which has some auto-expand templates for common Java boilerplate, like iterating over an array.