[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell's market

[Arnaud Bailly]

Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> writes:

> Perhaps there is a chance for cooperation?

That would be a pleasure for me. I must stress that my knowledge of
Haskell is purely theoretical, the only thing I ever programmed *with*
Haskell was a small automata package. I have however good knowledge of
the language itself (I wrote a parser for it), of its semantics and
of low to intermediate level (lazy) functional programming features. I
also have some knowledge of part of the theory behind haskell's type
system, I understand monads, both from a practical (why it is usefeul)
and a theoretical (where it comes from and why it works) point of
view.  

As I said before, I have the intuition that Haskell should be most useful
as a tool for something like executable design and specification, as
it is obviously a tool of choice for producing correct code thanks to
strong type system, and it has nice features for working with
languages, grammars, automatas ... I don't see it as a workhorse
language for programming mundane tasks like producing tens or hundreds
of simple business services and processes: looking for an article,
creating a sale, registering articles with it, ...

I have in mind (and a bit in java code) an architecture where you
would have business services hardwired and packaged, for example in C
or Java. These services would be composed - possibly transactionnaly -
through business processes described using a high-level language, with
possible transformations/adaptations at deploy or run-time. The
processes could be generated to any technological platform using kind
of automata/graph traversal/encoding, with the communication medium
automatically processed. 

The presentation layer, would be handcoded or designed with RAD tools
and wired to processes. I have some small parts of this process in
Java and took me a lot of efforts, I think that HAskell has built-in
capabilities to do part of what I want out-of-the-box and libraries
for building upon.  But I am not sure this vision is true and it could
be articulated in the time frame of a real-world project. 

>
> BTW, I think it would be nice if we could use Template Haskell
> quoting facilities for generating code in languages other than
> Haskell.
>

Sure. Looks very interesting, sort of OO reflexion at compile time ?

> Best regards
Idem.

BTW, are you the Tomasz Zielonka of the asynchronous automata ?

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