[Haskell-cafe] funct.prog. vs logic prog., practical Haskell

[Richard O'Keefe]

>
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:25 AM, Petr Pudlak <deb at pudlak.name> wrote:
>    Hi all,
>
> I'd like to convince people at our university to pay more attention to
> functional languages, especially Haskell. Their arguments were that
>
>    (1) Functional programming is more academic than practical.
>    (2) They are using logic programming already (Prolog); why is  
> Haskell
>        better than Prolog (or generally a functional language better  
> than a
>        logic programming language)?

Why can't a language be both?
Get them to take a look at Mercury, which is *both*
a logic programming language *and* a (strict) functional
programming language, with Haskell-style type-classes and
Clean-style uniqueness types.

Mercury has been described as "Prolog for serious software
engineers".