[Haskell-cafe] Aim Of Haskell

ajb at spamcop.net ajb at spamcop.net
Sun Dec 10 20:59:10 EST 2006


G'day all.

Quoting Kaveh Shahbazian <kaveh.shahbazian at gmail.com>:

> What is the aim of Haskell?

Stanley Kubrick famously once said that he doesn't make the sort of
movies that he thinks other people want to see, he makes the sort of
movies that HE wants to see.

While Haskell started life as a "standard" research platform (i.e. to
consolidate a bunch of previous platforms each of which were subtly
different), the current aim of Haskell is to make a programming language
and environment that "we" want to use to write real-world applications,
as well as a means to support research into ways to express those
applications.

> After all Erlang was chosen, in second place Clean and in 3rd Haskell.

Well I'm not going to argue with any of those three choices.  Erlang, your
final choice, is a fine programming language.  It was designed by Ericsson
as the sort of language that they wanted to write some of their stuff in,
much like Haskell.

> If it is going to
> be used in real world applications it needs more attention to real world
> application developers and their needs.

Apart from the lack of a standard GUI, what doesn't Haskell provide that
you want?  I believe you that Erlang has something that you need that
Haskell doesn't give, you, but you're going to need to be more specific.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage


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