[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Martin Coxall]

On 7/17/07, Thomas Conway <drtomc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/18/07, Hugh Perkins <hughperkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Am I the only person who finds it interesting/worrying that there are few to
> > no people in the group who are ex-C# programmers.  I mean, you could argue
> > that C# programmers are simply too stupid to do Haskell, but ... you know,
> > there is another explanation ;-)
>
> I wouldn't say too stupid, but it may be a cultural thing. People
> working in C++ are more likely to be doing what I would call
> "technical" programming, and correspondingly more likely to be
> interested in Haskell, and to appreciate what it has to offer from
> painful personal experience. From what I know of the marketplace,
> people working in C# are more likely to be doing client/integration
> work where technical finesse is less important, and are therefore less
> likely to see the point.

Quite. Any C++ developer who has spent any time with Boost knows and
has experienced the horror of Boost::Lambda.

C++ template metaprogramming *is* a pattern-matching pure functional
language with type classes (template classes), but it's syntatically
ugly and far too minimal. The Boost community are doing a valiant job
of trying to add higher order capabilities to C++, but the langauge is
just not set up for it.

Maybe when C++0x matures, and C++ has concepts, variadic template
parameters etc., things will be more civilized.

Or we can use Haskell, which has them now.

FWIW, C# is slowly gaining higher order concepts too. C# 2.0: Ad hoc
polymorphism, closures (anonymous delegates). C# 3.0: Lambda
expressions, higher-order functions over collections, LINQ, etc.

Martin