[Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem

[Joel Reymont]

On Nov 17, 2005, at 10:59 PM, Scotty Weeks wrote:

> What would your impression be of building an application in Haskell  
> versus Erlang from a practical point of view given your experiences  
> with this project and the Erlang poker server?

I would have been done much faster and with far less trouble. The  
scripting would have been a royal pain in the rear for the customer,  
though. But, again, I would have been done much faster as network  
clients/servers is what Erlang excels at. That and concurrency.

Haskell... I'm still trying to figure out why reading from a Chan  
with getChanContents and then printing out the contents works and  
doing the same with readChan and looping blocks. Or why the app now  
crashes violently on Mac OSX but works without a hitch on Windows.  
And I still don't have a good timeout combinator.

I felt very excited this morning given the newly found love between  
my app and Windows but the excitement lasted only until I realized  
that hWaitForIO blocks all other threads :-(.

> My feelings having developed a little with Erlang and embarking on  
> a Haskell project are that the learning curve is far steeper with  
> Haskell but it is far more elegant and readable. I'm still climbing  
> that curve though (IO makes me want to pull my hair out).

Unless lightning strikes and tomorrow morning I figure out what's the  
deal with the spurious Mac OSX crashes, I think this might be my last  
network app in Haskell. I should really be spending time on the  
business end of the app intead of figuring out platform differences  
and the like.

	Joel

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