[Haskell-cafe] Re: How does one get off haskell?

[Pete Chown]

Evan Laforge wrote:

> I used to get annoyed about all the java boilerplate and awkwardness.
> But then I learned that if I relax and stop thinking so much about the
> aesthetics of what I'm writing, I can just let my fingers go on typing
> without having to think too much.

:-) A good Java IDE will write most of the boilerplate, too.  I find the 
most annoying thing is not *writing* the boilerplate, it's the fact that 
it clutters things up and makes it hard to see what is going on.

> Ultimately the problems to be solved are the same, it's just that java
> and c++ give you a lot of padding where you're writing boilerplate and
> workarounds for not having closures, monadic values, a nice type
> system, etc.

One thing I'm curious about is Haskell versus Python or Ruby.  Code in 
those languages is, IMO, prone to type related bugs because there is no 
compile-time checking.  On the other hand, I would expect the 'density' 
of the code to be similar to Haskell.  You can do a lot of the same 
things, although they support an OO programming style too.

Interestingly, the Shootout benchmarks show Haskell doing quite poorly 
on code size.  I suspect that is because a lot of effort has gone into 
making those programs fast at the expense of everything else, though.

Pete