[cells-devel] More newbie questions

[Kenny Tilton]

Mike J. Bell wrote:

>Hey Kenny...I've got sort of a philosophical question for you.  (I'm
>much more interested in the intent of Cells rather than the mechanics,
>even though the mechanics define the intent...I'm sure you know what I
>mean).
>
>The spirit of Cells seems to be to very much like the declarative
>functional world of spreadsheets (ok, I cheated and actually *read*
>that in the docs.  =).  If I were to start a new project (and thus
>legacy code/app is irrelevant), why would I use Cells and not Haskell
>or some other pure lazy functional language?
>
>If the answer is along the lines of "CL is super cool 1337 d00d, why
>use anything else" that's fine.    What I'm digging for here is any
>major philosophical differences between using Cells (and I mean
>*using*, like building your entire app on as much Cells functionality
>as possible and not mixing paradigms)
>
aside: actually, I think it would be hard to mix paradigms. I always 
point out that Cells is a slippery slope: use them a little and pretty 
soon you have to use them for everything.

the paradigm is not "lazy functional", it is "dataflow". In my apps, all 
input gets fed into c-input cells, and all application behavior is 
manifested by def-c-output methods. The web of cells is a working model 
where slots have causal power over other slots.

The feel of the /programming/ is spreadsheet-y, but the result is, 
again, a working model. Working in the sense that one simply SETfs an 
input cell and the whole model reacts /and/ behaves automatically, 
according to the supplied rules. Of course, a spreadsheet is also a 
working model.

getting back to the slippery slope, I am not sure how one could combine 
imperative, programmer-oriented control with the automatic dataflow 
engine -- where would one put the hooks?

> and purely functional,
>declarative, lazy languages.  What's the discriminator?
>  
>
Sorry, I have never used anything like Haskell, so I have no idea what 
it feels like or how to compare, other than what I said above. But maybe 
this will be close (my apologies if I am muddying the waters): if you 
have a lazy functional language, the control lies outside the 
declarative authoring, because, as I understand lazy, nothing happens 
until someone asks. So there must be a control flow programmed some 
other way (imperative?) which finally does the asking. In which case one 
is not really getting all the benefit possible out of the declarative 
approach.

kt