[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell and scripting

[Donn Cave]

Quoth =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Limestra=EBl?= <limestrael at gmail.com>,

> That's an interesting debate: How do you imagine the future programming
> languages?
> But not today's topic.

I think you're in a position to make the premise much more interesting,
by elaborating the kind of programming interface you want to expose.

We've been through the generalities of this discussion before - is "map"
hard, are "for" loops easy?  what if you never learned an imperative
language, does that make a difference, aren't functional languages the
most natural because everyone knows about equations, ... etc.  Oh, and
let's talk about LISP and decide whether it's a success or failure!

Scripting interfaces are an unusual twist, though.  Different audience,
different ambitions.  Who would pick Tcl for a programming language?
but it has been popular for scripting (still?  don't know.)  It would
be interesting to look at some hypothetical examples that script your
application, using Haskell vs. Lua or whatever.  Haskell might look
pretty good.  For example, you'll probably expose some application
data, and a programmer could easily be confused about whether a variable
is application global data or not, or confused about whether operations
on that variable are global in effect.  I'm guessing this would turn
out clearer in Haskell, along with other things having to do with
"variables."

	Donn Cave, donn at avvanta.com