[Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

[brad clawsie]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 05:55:08AM -0700, kynn wrote:
> 
> Perl is a large, ugly, messy language filled with quirks and eccentricities,
> while Haskell is an extremely elegant language whose design is guided by a
> few overriding ideas.  (Or so I'm told.)

i find that don's "haskell hacking blog" has been written with the daily
hacker in mind:

http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog

my own experience is that i would gladly replace perl for many tasks
if haskell's libraries were *easier to use*. for common and simple tasks
like reading data from a network resource (http, ftp), querying a
database, accessing xml (dom, etc), its more important to me to have
an api that is simple to use than one that takes an "interesting"
approach. perl's apis for these tasks tend to be very simple.

hackage seems to be on track to deliver the advantages of the cpan
tool and repository, so in that sense i think one of the key
advantages of perl has been adopted by the haskell community.

both languages have great communities!