[Haskell-cafe] A very edgy language (was: A very nontrivial parser)

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

trebla:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
> >Personally, I just try to avoid *all* language extensions - mainly 
> >because most of them are utterly incomprehensible. (But then, perhaps 
> >that's just because they all cover extremely rare edge cases?)
> 
> Haskell is an extremely rare edge case to begin with.
> 
> Non-strict (most implementations lazy): rarely useful if you ask the 
> mainstream.
> 
> Static typing: extreme paranoia.
> 
> Purely functional: vocal minority of edgy people.
> 
> Haskell syntax: "map f xs" is utterly incomprehensible to both the 
> mainstream "why not map(f,xs)" and the Schemers "why not (map f xs)". 
> Great way to alienate everyone out there.

Give #haskell is a far larger community than:

    #lisp
    #erlang
    #scheme
    #ocaml

As well as

    #java
    #javascript
    #ruby
    #lua
    #d
    #perl6

Maybe we need to reconsider where the (FP) mainstream is now? :-)

-- Don