[Haskell-beginners] an observation about Haskell vs. Python

[Dennis Raddle]

As a somewhat-newbie haskell user and longtime Python user, what I have
observed is this.

Haskell creates compile-time error messages that are somewhat hard to
understand for beginners.

Python (or any scripting language) creates run-time bugs that are hard to
understand.

One reason for the weird (to a beginner) compile errors in Haskell is its
expressivity -- almost any sequence of identifiers could potentially mean
something, and if you make a mistake, the compiler is sure to find some
"weird" way to interpret it.

But Python suffers from a similar problem -- it's not as expressive a
language, but it is very permissive, not insisting on type correctness,
order of arguments, or any of a number of things so that the programmer can
write a program that compiles with no errors -- but has strange run-time
bugs.

I'll take Haskell. I'm a bit OCD about getting the bugs out of my programs,
and Python just opens up too many holes for me to relax with it.

Dennis
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