[Haskell-cafe] Haskell not ready for Foo [was: Re: Hypothetical Haskell job in New York]

[John Goerzen]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 11:14:18AM -0700, John A. De Goes wrote:
> But really, what's the point? FFI code is fragile, often uncompilable  
> and unsupported, and doesn't observe the idioms of Haskell nor take  
> advantage of its powerful language features. Rather than coding through 

That is an extraordinarily cruel, and inaccurate, sweep of FFI.

I've worked with C bindings to several high-level languages, and I
must say that I like FFI the best of any I've used.  It's easy to use
correctly, stable, and solid.  If anything, it suffers from
under-documentation.

The whole point of FFI is to bring other languages into the Haskell
fold.  So you can, say, talk to a database using its C library and
wind up putting the strongly-typed HaskellDB atop it.  Or you can
write an MD5 algorithm in C and make it look like a regular Haskell
function.

> You can indeed fit a square peg in a round hole, if you pound hard  
> enough. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.

And with that, I fully agree.

-- Joh