[Haskell-cafe] Doing some things right

Ketil Malde ketil+haskell at ii.uib.no
Fri Dec 28 14:05:19 EST 2007


Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:

>>     http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/%7Edtai/projects/ALP//newsletter/dec07/content/Articles/tom/content.html

> "Haskell is the undisputed flagship of the FP community."

> Er... really? 

It depends on how you define the "FP community", of course.  The
author counts participation at ICFP, so he probably has an academic
slant. 

> I thought Lisp and Erlang were both infinitely more
> popular and better known. 

Certainly not infinitely.  Lisp isn't entirely functional, and while
Erlang is an industrial success story, I think Haskell is seeing a
wider range of application.

> [I actually heard a number of people tell me that learning LISP would
> change my life forever because LISP has something called "macros".

The close ties between data and code in Lisp gives some nice
opportunities for your program to e.g. manipulate itself.  For
e.g. genetic programming.

I think macros are used for bottom-up design (i.e. building EDSLs),
where you would use higher-order functions in Haskell.

(I don't really have a lot of Lisp experience, I'd be interested to
hear if other people agree or not)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants


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