From: Michael Schuerig <schuerig@...>
Date: 2002-12-18T18:29:44+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: Functional Language Recommendation

Shashank Date wrote:

> 
> "Dan Schmidt" <dfan@dfan.org> wrote in message
>> Haskell is really beautiful and elegant but it can
>> take more effort to write real-world apps because everything must be
>> expressed purely functionally.
> 
> For this reason alone (takes more effort to write) , I have always
> wondered why Haskell has been endorsed as the language of the year at
> PragProg. I would have thought O'Caml would be more "pragmmatic" in
> that sense.

If I'm not mistaken, the point of choosing Haskell as the LotY was 
exactly that it is a purely functional language.

If the  choice of language had to be pragmatic in itself, we'd probably 
end up with Perl/Python/Ruby/Java/C++ all the time. It can be, 
pragmatic, though, to learn languages that aren't themselves very 
practical/pragmatic for the time being.

> Unless, of course, O'Caml has already been covered in the past.

Nope. This year's Haskell-LotY was the first one.

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig                  If at first you don't succeed...
mailto:schuerig@acm.org           try, try again.
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/   --Jerome Morrow, "Gattaca"