[Haskell-cafe] Why are OCaml and Haskell being used at these companies?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr wrote:

> Henning Thielemann writes:
>
> > jerzy.karczmarczuk at info.unicaen.fr wrote:
> >
> >> Henning Thielemann writes:
> >>
> >> > ?? Mathematica and MatLab are just the opposite of statically safe
> >> > programming.
> >>
> >> Is this a religious statement, quite popular in our Church of Functionalism,
> >> or you mean something concrete by that, and if yes, then what?
> >
> > I meant that these languages, which are the main products of Wolfram and
> > MathWorks, respectively, are untyped or at least dynamically typed, and
> > thus are certainly not the appropriate tools for reliable development and
> > maintenance.  However, I see that Jon Harrop claimed statical type safety
> > only for OCaml and Haskell, and functional design and high productivity
> > for Mathematica and MatLab et.al.
>
> Well, Henning, it is quite a statement: "certainly not the appropriate tools
> for reliable development and maintenance". Tell that to those legions of
> people who made dozens of thousands of programs in Lisp (or Scheme), in
> Smalltalk, etc. And now in Erlang...

I think there is a difference between 'many people have done it this way'
and 'it was an appropriate choice to do so'.