From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata <billtj@...>
Date: 2002-08-22T01:32:37+09:00
Subject: Re: What New Language After Ruby?

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your opinion.  However, do you think learning Haskell
is really something that we can justify to our supervisors, or is it
something that we should learn during our own free time?  Can you really
put Haskell into a production code?

Based on other responses, there are several Lisp-like
(functional) languages such as Ocaml, Mercury, ML, Scheme, and
Haskell.  Since I cannot find the discussion in the Loty web site, does
anybody know why Haskell is chosen among the various functional languages?

To me several factors influence the "usefulness" of a language:
    - how long the language has been around (related to bug fixes)
    - number of users (related to getting help)
    - can be interfaced to C/C++ or Java (related to production code)
    - amount of library (related to practicality)
    - execution and memory performance (related to why we should drop C)
    - easy, clean, short, and regular syntax (related to our time :) )

Does Haskell satisfy any or a lot of these criteria?  (To me, Ruby
satisfies all of them, except the execution and memory performance, which
is then solved by writing the C extension.)

Regards,

Bill
============================================================================
Wilkes Joiner <boognish23@yahoo.com> wrote:
> By the way, I've found Haskell very challenging.  It is a paradigm shift, and
> those are always hard. However, overcoming those challenges has been a very
> worthwhile experience, and I feel that it has improved my coding, especially
> from a design perspective.

> Cheers,
> Wilkes