[Haskell-cafe] A very edgy language (was: A very nontrivial parser)

[Thomas Conway]

On 7/8/07, Dave Bayer <bayer at cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote:
> This of course sets up the best answer to this debate: For a hard
> problem, one can express better algorithms in Haskell that would
> simply be too painful to code in other languages, swamping any
> considerations about the speed of Haskell versus C for a given
> algorithm.

This is certainly true. I've coded up in less than six months,
something that uses better algorithms and finer grained concurrency
than the software I used to work on, and the latter represented 5 or
more man-years of coding. However this is server software, which is
long running so performance and memory usage are pretty important, and
these are relatively hard to get right in Haskell. OTOH, you can tell,
I think it's a good trade off - I did convince the mgt to let me doit
in Haskell in the first place. :-)

-- 
Thomas Conway
drtomc at gmail.com

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.