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

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Jul 7, 2007, at 7:23 , Thomas Conway wrote:

> I've been working in a mostly Python shop this last year, and it
> reinforces my belief that people who don't like strong static typing
> are yahoos, not professionals interested in producing high quality
> code. Maybe I just don't get the line between professionalism and
> paranoia. ;-)

Security is one of my "side specialties" (i.e. not my main focus as a  
sysadmin, but a greater focus than e.g. storage or networking which  
aren't really my focus at all).  And it seems to me that most people  
treat it about the same way they treat the notion of strong typing.   
In fact, I could make pretty much the same point about  
professionalism vs. paranoia with respect to security; the difference  
being that, thanks to Internet-facing credit card processing systems,  
at least *some* people have had their faces rubbed in their mistakes.

(This correspondence is in fact one of the reasons I became  
interested in Haskell.  http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a- 
type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem is exactly the kind of  
thing I was hoping to find.)

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH