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

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 01:21:50AM +0100, Marc A. Ziegert wrote:
> - clisp or scheme
> forget those lisp languages. boooring. brackets everywhere. lisp was
> one of the first (was the first?) functional languages.

What does clisp mean here? A Common Lisp implementation
(http://clisp.cons.org/) or a shortcut for Common Lisp? I guess the
latter.

Common Lisp is definitely not a functional language in the sense that it
does not enforce or even encourage functional programming. Common Lisp
people will tell you that CL is a multiparadigm language.

I may not like CL, but I wouldn't say it's boring.

> if you like to experiment with the lambda-calculus, this is the perfect language.

CL was not based on lambda-calculus, at least originally. Perhaps scheme
more so. Haskell will be much more nice for (typed) lambda-calculus
experiments than CL.

> 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.

Do not confuse Scheme and Common Lisp. While the former probably may be
learned in short time, the latter is probably as complicated as C++.

> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_programming_language>

Have *you* read it? ;-)

> - haskell
> it is like the "c++<stl>" of functional languages, just higher.

Please, don't compare Haskell to C++. You are not making any good for
Haskell with this, and IMHO C++ doesn't not deserve being compared to
Haskell.

> 2.) waiting for a new ghc release, with new never-thought-of-before
> high-level language extensions, can make you crazy.

This is one very nice thing about GHC - you get some surprise presents
almost every year ;-)

What I am concerned about is that adding features also means adding
errors, or not fixing old errors fast enough. What we need is more
people working on fixing bugs.

Best regards
Tomasz

-- 
I am searching for a programmer who is good at least in some of
[Haskell, ML, C++, Linux, FreeBSD, math] for work in Warsaw, Poland