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

[Andrew Coppin]

On 04/11/2010 08:17 PM, Henning Thielemann wrote:
>
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2010, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> For me at least 1985 is the year, where the Amiga 1000 was released. 
> At this time, machines with a MC 68020 were refered to as "Work 
> stations", what for me meant something like "expensive professional 
> computer". For Amiga with some megabytes RAM and a CD drive we had the 
> Geek-Gadgets-2-CD in 1997 that contained Gofer. However at this time I 
> was glad to program in object oriented style and especially GUIs with 
> OOP.
>

I didn't get to see the Amiga 600 until at least five or six years later 
than that. (It's actually news to me that the Amiga line is that old.) 
And I spent most of my time programming it in Pascal (or AMOS BASIC - 
but that's not really "BASIC" any more). And between that, there was 
Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5 for MS-DOS, if you were forced to use a PC. 
It's scary to think that even way back then, vastly superior languages 
were being used in secret...