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A comment on What programming languages should I learn and why?. Parent comment

Re:What programming languages should I learn and why? by jaggederest on Monday May 21, 2007 @04:13AM (#23553)
Well, if you avoid side effects assiduously enough, other languages can certainly have that sort of purity.

However, you have to remember, avoiding side effects is what enables lazy evaluation, which is a huge gain in terms of performance. If you're not restricting side effects, you can't default to lazy evaluation.

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Re:What programming languages should I learn and why? by ced on Monday May 21, 2007 @04:39AM (#23562)
True... And not having lazy evaluation encourages one to write Matrix.CalculateDeterminant() rather than Matrix.determinant, as it should be. But I don't think that has to do with reuse.
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Re:What programming languages should I learn and why? by jaggederest on Monday May 21, 2007 @12:32PM (#23635)
Right, I'm saying, code reuse via no side effects is a nice part of the package deal
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