[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] pros and cons of static typing and side effects ?

[Ketil Malde]

Martin Vlk <vlcak01 at tiscali.cz> writes:


> http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Staff/Current/michaelw/sttt-ml-haskell.pdf

Interesting to see others' experiences, even if they are slightly
negative.

> It contains descriptions of lots of real-world problems and how

They are only implementing TRUTH and CWB, no?

> Among other things it touches on the static typing pros and cons

One critique against the paper is that they discuss language features
at great length, but conclude that:

|    However, it turned out in our discussions that none of us were
| enthusiastic about the idea of using a functional language for a
| future verification tool because of their impoverished environments
| compared with mainstream programming languages. 

I would like to see more discussion of what is "impoverished" about
the environments, and what they consider "mainstream programming
languages".  Certainly the authors could have discussed this in the
main part of the paper?

| Our impression was that SML and Haskell can play out their
| advantages mainly in the prototyping stages of a project, an arena
| where both would have to compete with dynamic languages like Lisp or
| Smalltalk, or scripting languages like Python (which have faster
| turn-aroundcycles due to absence of a compilation phase).

I'm not sure the authors are even aware or the existence of
interactive environments (e.g. Hugs and GHCi are not mentioned, only
Haskell *compilers*). 

Disclaimer: I just browsed quickly through the paper.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants