[Haskell-cafe] Re: "Haskell is a scripting language inspired by Python."

[Andrew Coppin]

On 04/11/2010 02:16 PM, Jonathan Geddes wrote:
> Regardless of which languages got which features for which other
> languages, Haskell is surely NOT a "scripting language inspired by
> python"...

Affirmative.

It's a full-scale programming language (although I gather folks do use 
it for scripting too), and while it may or may not contain features that 
are also in Python, it is manifestly /not/ "inspired by" Python. Clearly 
it was inspired my Miranda and the host of similar-yet-incompatible 
languages like it. (The design goal was to replace these languages, 
after all.)

On a somewhat tangental note: It seems increadible to me that Haskell 
was invented in 1990, and Miranda way back in 1985. At the same time, 
Commodore Business Machines released the iconic Commodore 64 in 1982, 
and most of the civilised people of the world spent the next 10 years or 
so writing computer programs in BASIC. It's a rather sobering thought to 
think that way back in those long-lost days of 8-bit microprocessors, 
RF-modulated graphics and unstructured programming, there were people 
somewhere working on languages such as Miranda. I mean, comparing BASIC 
to FP is like comparing a water pistol to a tactical thermonuclear 
device. (!) Where the heck did all this stuff happen?! Can you actually 
run something like Haskell with mere kilobytes of RAM?