Will Haskell be commercialized in the future?

Doug Ransom Doug_Ransom@pml.com
Mon, 27 Nov 2000 09:09:05 -0800


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Benjamin L. Russell [mailto:russell@brainlink.com]
> Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 11:50 PM
> To: Doug Ransom; haskell-cafe@haskell.org
> Subject: Re: Will Haskell be commercialized in the future?
> 
> 
> On Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:15:52 -0800
>  Doug Ransom <Doug_Ransom@pml.com> wrote:
> > 
> > [stuff deleted]
> > 
> > A lot of the things Haskell excells at (IMO) inferior
> > tools are being used
> > in place.  For example, microsoft has build good XSLT
> > translators and two
> > new compilers (C#, VB7) in the last couple years.
> > Unfortunately, C#, not
> > Haskell, will probably be "the" language for the next
> > decade.  [stuff deleted]
> 
> Just out of curiosity:  what makes you so sure about C#?  C# 
> has some potential big problems, too:  in particular, the 
> ability to declare a portion of the code "unsafe," which can 
> encourage unsafe programming among entrenched C/C++ programmers.

Well, first of all, most C++ programmers really hate C++ and will be happy
to stay in safe mode and move to C#.  There were cheers at the Microsoft
Profesional Developers Conference when MS announced garbage collection for
the COM replacement and the safety available with C# and managed C++ code.
C# is a huge improvement over C++.

Why would a C++ programmer want to go into unsafe mode? I guess when they
are writing interfaces to device drives, operating system calls, and legacy
interfaces.


> 
> I myself am in no big hurry to master C#.  I'd rather use a 
> set of domain-specific languages with interlinked code, 
> rather than a single language that purports to be as 
> general-purpose as C# does.

Well, I would prefer to master Haskell and use that as my general purpose
language.  Fat chance since the object models available in the microsoft
common language runtime are designed for impertive programming.




> 
> Benjamin L. Russell
> russell@brainlink.com
> "Furuike ya!  Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto."  --Matsuo Basho
>