[Haskell-beginners] Some beginning questions for Haskell

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 05:04, Liu shuping <lsp.lhh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am new to Haskell, currently I am doing .Net development on windows
> platform. I began to know about Haskell for the reason when I knew some C#
> lambda features come from functional language. I am interested in Haskell
> from the very beginning when I saw it.
> For I am really a very beginner, I get some basic questions:
> 1. Can you have some very general information to explain why use Haskell or
> functional language.

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf

> 2. Is it a right choice of Haskell if I want to develop some geology
> software which mainly doing some huge numerical computation which takes long
> long time?

My gut tells me that the language isn't as important as the available hardware
in this case.  The second issue is that you'll need efficient implementations
of the math you make use of; I suspect you won't find highly optimised math
libraries specialising in this area within the Haskell community (please prove
me wrong).

You can of course always create Haskell bindings for a good library; writing
the control logic in Haskell and leave the number crunching to something
that's closer to HW maybe.

> 3. How about user interface, is Haskell capable to build application with
> complex user interface? or should I just use Haskell to build the core
> engine and user other language to build the user interface?

It depends on what kind of user interface you want.  For desktop applications
you have the GTK bindings.  But that will only look native on Gnome systems.

Web UIs are popular, there are web frameworks for Haskell, but arguably the UI
wouldn't be written in Haskell but rather in javascript.

You might want to have a look at flapjax[1] if you decide to go the
web-UI route.

> 4. Is Haskell cross-platform? I mean if the Haskell source code is "code
> once and build everywhere?"

This is more a question about libraries rather than the language itself.  The
basic libraries are x-platform, except of course for the platform-specific
parts.

> 5. Are there any successful applications built with Haskell?  they can give
> me a direct scene of what Haskell can do.

Depending on what you mean by "successful":

  • ghc
  • darcs
  • happstack
  • leksah

/M


[1] http://www.flapjax-lang.org/
-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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