[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell and scripting

[Daniel Fischer]

On Thursday 06 May 2010 16:32:50, Limestraël wrote:
> ^^
> That's an interesting debate: How do you imagine the future programming
> languages?
> But not today's topic.
> It's strange that, since Lisp is still used now, especially for teaching
> purposes, and since everybody complains about parenthesises, nobody
> developed a Lisp-like just based on indentation...

Readable Lisp. Now, that could be an interesting language :)

> To my mind, I think that as long as you lay out well your code, Lisp is
> quite readable. I don't see why the parenthesises would make it harder
> to learn.

It's idiosyncratic. I just don't manage to see through them. If you don't 
get distracted by the parentheses, good for you.

>
> Daniel, prior to learn Haskell, did you know other functional languages?

No. Just some faint memories of Pascal from twenty years before and a bit 
of Java.
Haskell just matched the natural way of thinking pretty closely.
It might have something to do with the fact that I studied mathematics.

> Cause I didn't, and let me tell you that the functional way of coding
> wasn't obvious while beginning (now I can't do without), especially the
> whole monad thing.
> Problem: Haskell without monads (or structures even more unusual, like
> Arrows) is no longer Haskell (can be subject to debate, too), so you
> have to get the point if you want to use properly the language. Or else
> you stuck to quicksort-like algorithms which show the beauty of the
> language, but not its power.
>
> 2010/5/6 Pierre-Etienne Meunier <pierreetienne.meunier at gmail.com>
>
> > Fifty years ago someone came up with this idea of lisp and
> > parentheses. By now in year 2010, I have never heard of any programmer
> > who never made jokes about it.

I don't remember ever making a joke about it. But I'm not a programmer, so 
I'm not a counterexample.

> >
> > ... good luck limestraël ;-)
> >

Seconded.