[Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp

[David F. Place]

On Sep 16, 2005, at 6:26 PM, Glynn Clements wrote:

> Haskell's safety and
> consistency can get in the way, while Lisp's freedom can be quite
> unsafe and inconsistent.

I have many years of experience designing and implementing commercial  
software in lisp and I strongly agree with the second part of this  
sentence.   However, my more recent experience with Haskell makes me  
doubt very much the first part.  Haskell's powerful type system  
hasn't in the least cramped my style and lazy evaluation eliminates  
99% of the need for macros in lisp.   (The other 1% is syntactic  
sugar of doubtful utility.) Since Haskell supports recursive  
polymorphic types it can easily handle all of the metaprogramming  
problems where lisp first made its mark.

I don't see any reason to continue to use lisp.

ps. This thread was on Haskell-cafe which seems more appropriate, so  
I'm bringing it back.

--------------------------------
David F. Place
mailto:d at vidplace.com