F#

[Simon Marlow]

On 21 May 2004 01:07, John Sharley wrote:

> I note this remark on the Microsoft Research site
> (http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ilx/fsharp.aspx)
> <quote>
> Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent within certain
> niches, but unfortunately some simple programming exercises can
> quickly turn into problems that require a PhD. to solve.
> </quote>
> 
> Are the Microsoft Research people working on GHC or anyone else on
> this list also of this opinion? If so, why?
> 
> What if anything does the quoted remark mean for the prospects of
> seeing a production Haskell compiler from Microsoft?

A response from the author of that page (Don Syme, also here at MSRC):

On 21 May 2004 15:00, Don Syme wrote:

> I've removed the offending line, since I didn't mean to be
> inflammatory.  I believe it to be true - writing a GUI library
> wrapper for Win32 is fairly simple in C#, pretty hard in F#, and
> really quite researchy in Haskell - but others obviously don't agree.
> 
> Replaced with
> 
> Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent
> within certain niches, but non-trivial problems exist with language
> interoperability between lazy and strict languages.
> 
> I believe that is uncontroversial.  Forward this to the Haskell list
> if you like.  Change should propagate to research.microsoft.com
> sometime soon.  
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Don