[Haskell-cafe] What *not* to use Haskell for

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Wed Nov 12 16:51:14 EST 2008


Dave Tapley wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> So I should clarify I'm not a troll and do "see the Haskell light". But
> one thing I can never answer when preaching to others is "what does
> Haskell not do well?"
>
> Usually I'll avoid then question and explain that it is a 'complete'
> language and we do have more than enough libraries to make it useful and
> productive. But I'd be keen to know if people have any anecdotes,
> ideally ones which can subsequently be twisted into an argument for
> Haskell ;)
>   

Anything with hard performance requirements, and/or that needs to run on 
tiny computational resources (CPU speed, RAM size, etc.)

I'd say "device drivers" too, except that the House guys apparently 
managed to do this...

I'd really love to tell everybody that "Haskell is *the* language of 
algorithms" - except that it tends to not be very performant. 
Unfortunately, with the current state of the art, high-performance 
computer programs still require lots of low-level details to be 
explicitly managed. Hopefully one day this will cease to be the case.



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