[Haskell-cafe] What to say about Haskell?

Don Stewart dons at galois.com
Tue Jul 14 12:51:02 EDT 2009


patai_gergely:
> > > I would concentrate on the fact that when you use Haskell, you write
> > > code that is less prone to errors and bugs. When you write a program
> > > in Haskell and it finally compiles, chances are that there are far
> > > less bugs than in a program written in another language
> > 
> > the question is how to justify this in 1 hour. technical people don't
> > buy such arguments with justification. but if it will be done, it
> > would be best presentation possible
> That's not really the direction I'd like to take anyway, because as I
> said, the primary goal of this talk is not to convince these people to
> use Haskell, but to give them an overview that's "more helpful than
> reading a book", and it should definitely introduce specific language
> features and important patterns besides the general talk. The question
> is which topics are noteworthy. But here's some more context for you:
> 
> My talk will be the second (there's one every week). The first one will
> be a comparison of Prolog and Haskell by an expert of the former (not
> surprisingly a rather mathematically minded fellow), and the third one
> will be about monads in category theory. Also, the initiator of the
> seminars is mostly interested in processing natural languages, so it
> might be a good idea to bring up at least one relevant example -- for
> instance, the latest post on sigfpe's blog could be nice, but it comes
> with too many prerequisites.

See also Simon Peyton Jones' intro to Haskell, recently:

    http://erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/116/SimonPeyton-Jones-ErlangFactoryLondon2009-HaskellandErlangGrowinguptogether.pdf
    http://www.erlang-factory.com/conference/London2009/speakers/SimonPeytonJones

And one big difference from Prolog: centralized community resources.
One main implementation, one distribution mechanism, one build system,
one central library archive.

-- Don


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