[Haskell-cafe] [Newbie] Why or why not haskell ?

[Marc A. Ziegert]

hi Christophe.

> In terms of speed, is haskell good enough ?

in some cases, optimized haskell may even be faster than C. (that depends on your C-programming skills. i.e. function-inlining will speed C up, too.) how possible? look at the mangler:
<http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4.1/html/building/sec-porting-ghc.html#sec-mangler>

there were discussions about the efficiency of some compilers and their technics.
<http://www.mail-archive.com/glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org/msg08729.html>

networking:
hm. sorry, don't know. ...look at the libraries.


my personal experience with other languages:
- ada
nada.
- erlang
nice. easy to learn, functional, multi-threaded, and more elegant than lisp.
see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_3D> as example program.
- clisp or scheme
forget those lisp languages. boooring. brackets everywhere. lisp was one of the first (was the first?) functional languages. if you like to experiment with the lambda-calculus, this is the perfect language.
well, you still should learn it, because it is too easy to learn, and it is still used. maybe you will meet that language in the future. spend some time into learning it, before you learn haskell. some hours should be enough.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_programming_language>
suggestion: how about learning haskell and lisp at the same time? write an lisp-interpreter as your first haskell-project. ;)
- haskell
it is like the "c++<stl>" of functional languages, just higher. it is meta-programming. think about it as the tool-language, that replaces thousands of code-monkeys.
and it will be really easy, after you started to "think in haskell". that could take some time, so don't give up.
it has three giant disadvantages:
1.) you do not feel the need for learning other languages anymore.
2.) waiting for a new ghc release, with new never-thought-of-before high-level language extensions, can make you crazy.
3.) the industry prefers vc++.net, java#, vb-excel-script, php4iexplorer and other bug-friendly (most times proprietary and/or incompatible) languages instead of haskell.

to start with a functional language, read about the lambda-calculus. functional languages depend on it.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus>

to learn haskell, continue with...
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_programming_language>
<http://haskell.org/hawiki/> (especially about monads and arrows)
...and reading the library.
<http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/index.html>

as gui library, i preferr...
<http://www.haskell.org/gtk2hs/>

- marc