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

[Sterling Clover]

> 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
>

Just for clarity's sake, we should specify that the Erlang ffi  
interface that's been worked on (not my project, I've just browsed  
the code) is *not* low-level via C, but rather a set of parsers/ 
unparsers between haskell data types and the Erlang wire format and a  
set of behaviors for message queuing that between them let a haskell  
program act as a node to Erlang programs, or let Haskell programs  
communicate between themselves as nodes, which just coincidentally  
happen to use the same wire format as Erlang. Which is not to say  
that Erlang does not have specific excellent libraries that allow  
*certain types* of network programming do be done very easily. The  
Haskell library-space has lots of room to grow, and lots of  
inspiration to take from the OTP (although less for "hot-swapping"  
which is somewhat overrated, and more from supervision-tree type  
stuff). However, even now an adequate subset of whatever  
functionality is needed can be whipped up pretty quickly for any  
project requiring only that subset.

Cheers,
S.