[Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent non-programmers

[Lyndon Maydwell]

If you're interested in OS integration, it may be worth learning C# if
you're on windows. It's certainly quite amenable to 'glue', and it's
gaining more functional features all the time. Also, you have the
option of branching out to F# if you enjoy the .Net environment, but
crave a purer language.

I'd probably consider some combination of .Net and Mathematica if I
were doing trading on Windows and didn't mind paying for the software,
but it might not be a popular opinion :-)

Disclaimer -  I don't really know how trading works in practice.

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 04/29/2012 10:28 AM, Lorenzo Bolla wrote:
>>>
>>> What's the difference? You're not passing around the actual function, in
>>> any language.
>>
>> $ python
>> Python 2.7.3 (default, Apr 14 2012, 23:17:33)
>> [GCC 4.7.0 20120407 (prerelease)] on linux2
>> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>>> def f():
>> ...     print 'foo'
>> ...
>>>>> def g(f):
>> ...     print 'bar'
>> ...     f()
>> ...
>>>>> g(f)
>> bar
>> foo
>>
>> Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function#Language_support
>>
>
> You're not passing around the function, you're passing around the name
> of the function or a pointer. Python happens to know that when you write
> f(), you want to evaluate the function named f, much like when you say
> f.call() in Ruby.
>
> Ruby doesn't even have functions, only methods, so you have to entertain
> the idea that the same thing can have two different names to even have
> this discussion. Passing functions to other functions is so fundamental
> to Ruby that it's baked into the language:
>
>  irb(main):001:0> [1, 2, 3].map { |x| 2*x }
>  => [2, 4, 6]
>
> They're not called functions, but the distinction is imaginary. For an
> imperative language, the culture pretty strongly encourages you to use
> map, filter, fold etc. which are all passed functions (Procs) using the
> block syntax.
>
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