[Haskell-cafe] IDE? (and WHY I'm looking at Haskell)

[peterv]

Thanks for the nice info. I'm going to give it another try then...

When I said I don't want to learn Emacs, I meant not learning its LISP
architecture with the goal of creating my own custom Emacs... 

OT: The reasons I'm looking at Haskell are:

- the object oriented approach failed for me when working on large projects
in medium to large teams. OO works reasonably if you have a good design and
follow some rules, but no language enforces those rules (yet), so aliasing
and unwanted side effects leak all over and you spend a lot of time
debugging.
 
- I noticed I was using the "immutable" pattern a lot for solving problems
lately... So I got steered automatically towards the FP world, which is
immutable by definition. That is, excluding the IO "world" I guess, but as
far as I understand, monadic IO is also pure, in the sense it has no
aliasing, unless using unsafePerformIO. But since I'm a Haskell newbie, I'm
not going to claim I understand monads! ;-)

- After 20 years of hitting keyboards like a madman to reach yet another
crazy deadline, I got myself RSI in both arms (Workrave helps, but it's too
late :\) So I want to spend more time thinking than typing, and I certainly
don't want to type boiler plate code. But most OO languages are FULL of
boiler plate code, and are much more verbose than Haskell. 

- A last but not least, if all goes well, I will be teaching an undergrad
"applied mathematics for videogame development" course. This will be very
basic and practical mathematics. These students love games, so I want to let
then *play* with the math using a "mathematical" programming language. If
the school approves it (which is unlikely because the students will also be
learning C++ => confusing), this will most likely be very basic Haskell.
Being an old school C/C++ developer, I would find it unfortunate that the
students don't get to see some FP, because I believe FP can play an
important part in the future of videogame and even business software
development (even the "giants" in my industry seem to believe that in some
degree: see e.g.
http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2007/01/26/anders-hejlsberg-on-linq-an
d-functional-programming.aspx and
http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf)

So, if I decide to use Haskell, I want my students to get playing right away
using a nice IDE, because the young videogame generation is even more
spoiled and impatient than I am :) 

Peter V


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