[Haskell-cafe] Why Not Haskell?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

robdockins:
> On Aug 8, 2006, at 5:36 PM, Albert Lai wrote:
> 
> >"Brian Hulley" <brianh at metamilk.com> writes:
> >
> >>Also, the bottom line imho is that Haskell is a difficult language to
> >>understand, and this is compounded by the apparent cleverness of
> >>unreadable code like:
> >>
> >>     c = (.) . (.)
> >>
> >>when a normal person would just write:
> >>
> >>     c f g a b = f (g a b)
> >
> >All mainstream languages are also difficult to understand, with
> >similarly clever, unreadable code.  Let's have a fun quiz!  Guess the
> >mainstream languages in question:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >2. What language allows you to test primality in constant runtime?
> >   That is, move all the work to compile time, using its polymorphism.
> 
> GHC-Haskell (with enough extensions enabled)?  We're most of the way  
> there already with type arithmetic.  I bet putting together a nieve  
> primality test would be pretty doable.  In fact, I suspect that GHC's  
> type-checker is turing-complete with MPTCs, fundeps, and undecidable  
> instances.  I've been contemplating the possibility of embedding the  
> lambda calculus for some time (anybody done this already?)

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Type_arithmetic#A_Really_Advanced_Example_:_Type-Level_Lambda_Calculus

also

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Type_arithmetic#An_Advanced_Example_:_Type-Level_Quicksort

-- Don