[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

Stephen Tetley stephen.tetley at gmail.com
Tue Nov 3 17:49:54 EST 2009


2009/11/3 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>:

>
> As far as I can tell, Clean is to Haskell as C is to Pascal. I.e., Clean is
> notionally very similar to Haskell, but with lots of added clutter,
> complexity and general ugliness - but it's probably somehow more
> machine-efficient as a result.
>
> (All of which makes the name "Clean" rather ironic, IMHO.)


Ouch - you really could put it the other way round.

Clean has very little clutter, though I suppose some people might take
offence to it having simple macros (:==), but wait so does GHC via
-XCPP...

I think Clean had generics before Haskell had Data.Generics, otherwise
Haskell generally has more innovation, more people work on Haskell,
Haskell's motivation was language research...

Clean has far fewer libraries, more people use Haskell...

Clean used to be considered faster than Haskell, though I don't know
what the situation is now:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-October/033854.html

Clean is a very fine language, if I wasn't using Haskell I know what
my alternative choice would be.

Best wishes

Stephen


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