[Haskell-beginners] Is Haskell for me?

[Luca Ciciriello]

Hi.

Why not?

A friend of mine is a resercher in AI and is an expert in Neural network (solution spaces, matrices, etc). His programming language is Haskell. He is very happy to use Haskell (on MacOS X) in its reserach.

Personally I use Haskell with Postgres using HDBC or calling the postgress function in pqlib using the Haskell FFI (may favourite way).

 

I'm also an experienced C++ programmer (12 years) and I can say that C++ is a very complex language to learn from scratch and master it. Now I'm finding a little bit hard to switch  from an imperative language to a functional language. 

Anyway Haskell is a very beautiful and elegant and powerful language that you can use for everything.

 

About using a GUI, I've never used one on Mac. Sorry. I know that exist a Haskell extension called GTK2HS (see: http://www.haskell.org/gtk2hs/).

If you want to use GHC (the de-facto compiler for Haskell), the code produced is very fast and you have a very powerful support for concurrency and parallelism.

 

For further information go to: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ where you can find a lot of useful documentation and answers to ur questions.

 

Luca.

> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 13:58:16 +0000
> From: luislupe at gmail.com
> To: beginners at haskell.org
> Subject: [Haskell-beginners] Is Haskell for me?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to have some points of view on this subject.
> 
> I need to start a project on neural analysis and genetic algorithms
> that will process many millions of records in a Linux X86_64 box (some
> development also in a X32 computer). Maybe I'll use fuzzy logic, or
> case-based reasoning, or decision trees, too.
> 
> Recently, I finished a small project on genetic algorithms with
> Python, but since run-time is very important, my next project will
> need a fast language. Either I'll go to C++ or similar language or
> I'll try a functiional language - Haskell.
> Apart from some features in Python, I've never programmed thinking in
> a functional way.
> I'd like to avoid having to learn C++. I'd like to concentrate in
> getting the work done and Haskell seems like a solution. But...
> 
> My questions are:
> - Is Haskell able to read (also write to a point) data from databases
> in a fast and reliable way? (MySql or PostgreSQL)
> 
> - how could I program something like this in Haskell:
> .. generate random population
> .. for each one of the population:
> .. for time period 1 to ten million:
> .. evaluate method 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ....
> ..evaluate fitness of each one
> .. generate new population based on results of previous generation
> 
> It seems relatively intuitive for me to program this in an imperative
> language. But what about in Haskell?
> 
> - Is Haskell suitable to process data like this in a fast way
> (aproximate to C++?)
> 
> - In order for Haskell to be fast, coding is done in a 'natural' way
> or with use of special hidden details of the language?
> 
> - Although I always liked math, I no longer have the knowledge I used
> to have several years ago. Is this important to help program in this
> funcional language?
> 
> - Are there graphical packages available to plot results or is it easy
> to connect it to a Python (or C) library?
> 
> - Is code easily reusable in different future projects? Since it has
> no objects... how can it be done?
> 
> Sorry for all these questions, but I really need to know about this
> and that's why I want to read answers from knowledgeable people.
> 
> 
> Luis
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