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

[Mike Meyer]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:07:28 +0100
umptious <umptious at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Mike Meyer: Ruby makes a bad fit if Haskell is a goal (and that's a good
> goal)
> I don't see it as being a goal for this guy! He just wants to be able to
> write utilities he needs without bogging down in "becoming a programmer."

True. But this *is* a Haskell list.

> >> While Clojure is a
> great language, the most popular implementation is hooked into the
> JVM, and you wind up needing to deal with a lot Java infrastructure
> fairly quickly. Being able to use that infrastructure is a design
> goal, but adds to the learning curve. I haven't looked into Groovy,
> but suspect some of the same issues will arise (and hope a Groovy
> programmer will correct me if I'm wrong).<<
> I played around with Groovy for a weekend to write some utilities and a
> music generation program. I can't remember having to put any effort into
> "needing to deal with a lot Java infrastructure," even though I was using a
> midi library written for pure Java. But I'm not really sure what you mean
> (installing a Java compiler?? doesn't seem like a lot) and it doesn't
> matter - Python/Sagemaths and R seem like the most reasonable tools without
> spending big money.

A weekend wouldn't do it for Clojure, either. You probably just dumped
the java library into the current directory and used it, thus avoiding
all the issues with CLASSPATH. Trying to use third party libraries
(whether written in Java or Clojure), gets you into that. That - or
trying to build something you can use without having to type "java -cp
...." - gets you into java (or clojure) build tools. Which means you
now have to use the project layout those build tools default to, or
learn how to set things up so you can keep on using your project
layout - assuming you can. And the snowball isn't done yet...

I'd much rather deal with cabal's dependency problems!

    <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.

O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org