[Haskell-cafe] Why Not Haskell?

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Hans,

Friday, August 4, 2006, 8:17:42 PM, you wrote:

> 1) Haskell is too slow for practical use, but the benchmarks I found
> appear to contradict this.

it's an advertisement :D  just check yourself

> 2) Input and output are not good enough, in particular for graphical
> user interfacing and/or data base interaction. But it seems there are
> several user interfaces and SQL and other data base interfaces for
> Haskell, even though the tutorials don't seem to cover this.

i've seen a paper which lists 7 (as i remember) causes of small
Haskell popularity, including teaching, libraries, IDEs and so on. may
be someone will give us the url

i personally think that Haskell in its current state is appropriate
for system programming

> Are there other reasons why there seem to be just a few thousand
> (hundred?) Haskell programmers in the world, compared to the 3 million
> Java programmers and x million C/C++ programmers?

i once analyzed why C++ and not Eiffel or Modula-2 becomes the
language of 90's. my conclusion was what C and C++ becomes a tandem at
the late 80's - C raised popularity because it had OOP successor while
C++ becomes popular because it had imperative predecessor. Pascal,
Modula-2 or Eiffel was great languages, but they don't form such
tandems. So, now we have 3 million of Java programmers just because C was
a great tool for writing DOS apps :)

> Now I'm trying to come up with a business model for my algorithm and to
> avoid the mistakes I made 10 years ago. There is a lot of difference
> between a prototype and a working tool, and then there is a lot of
> difference between a working tool and a successful commercial
> application. Probably it doesn't make much sense to try and develop a
> tool in C++ or even Java, but if I have to go on my own on this, maybe
> Haskell could be feasible, both for fun and profit.

if speed isn't critical, if you don't need to use many libs, don't
need help from RAD tools in developing UI of your program - you can
use Haskell, imho


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com