From: William Djaja Tjokroaminata Date: 2002-08-23T23:18:32+09:00 Subject: Re: What New Language After Ruby? Thanks a lot, Marcin, for the valuable information. The description on the web page to interface with C is very encouraging. I also have checked that amazon.com has several books on Haskell; it is good. The last thing that concerns me is that the Google Groups does not have a comp.lang.haskell. There are some for Lisp, ML, and Scheme, although they are not as active as Ruby. Can anyone give me a pointer to the original reason why pragmaticprogrammer.com chooses Haskell instead of Scheme, Lisp, or ML? (If we just want to learn "a new thing", any of the functional languages will do, right? But to be both learning a new thing and being practical, I think it is a different story.) Regards, Bill ============================================================================= Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote: > Thu, 22 Aug 2002 01:32:37 +0900, William Djaja Tjokroaminata pisze: >> To me several factors influence the "usefulness" of a language: >> - how long the language has been around (related to bug fixes) > Haskell has 10 years. It has 2 alive implementations (ghc & nhc), > 1 maintained but not actively developed (Hugs), and 1 dead (hbc). >> - number of users (related to getting help) > Small. >> - can be interfaced to C/C++ or Java (related to production code) > Yes, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/ >> - amount of library (related to practicality) > Not many I think. >> - execution and memory performance (related to why we should drop C) > Average (it has compilers to native code but the language semantics > make it difficult to produce good code). It's hard to reason about > efficiency, especially memory usage, so unfortunately it's easy to > write inefficient programs. >> - easy, clean, short, and regular syntax (related to our time :) ) > Yes! > -- > __("< Marcin Kowalczyk > \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl > ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/