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Comment by stewbrew | Hacker News Reader

Ah those were the days when computers hardly had enough memory to even keep the Haskell standard prelude in memory.

Immutability doesn't necessarily require copying data all the time though if you copied data only when modified and used the right data structures, does it?

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1990?

I think the issue of mutability in OOP vs FP pre-dates that.

The Haskell 98 standard prelude is 39 kb big. Computers with less RAM than that were in use in the early 1980s. Since you're obviously an engineer by training, you may now ask why somebody would try to load an Haskell prelude in the early 1980s on a computer that isn't even capable of running a Haskell programme.

Anyway, I guess what I actually wanted to say got lost in the space between.

Actually, I'm wondering what Haskell has to do with any of this at all.

You're comparing the size of the current incarnation of a fairly modern functional programming runtime with the capacity of computers that existed 10 years before the first incarnation was realised...

The only message I can take from that is that programs today are quite big. That's only really interesting from a nostalgic point of view, I don't see what relevance it has to the discussion of mutability?

Of course, I could have missed something obviously significant here...

The parent poster was talking about immutability, "the early days" and copying data. I think my point was that you don't have to copy data all the time but this requires a clever interpreter/compiler that you could not have run "in the early days".

I'd also like to use the opportunity to say that I find those OOP vs FP posts at HN rather pointless.

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