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

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Luke Palmer <lrpalmer at gmail.com>,
...
> "Scripting language" strikes me as one of those terms that is used in
> heated arguments despite having no meaning (meaningless terms seem to
> proliferate as the heat is turned up).  I dunno, I just don't think it
> is a big deal.  Everybody seems to be calling Haskell a "DSL-writing
> language", but that can just as easily be taken as a point for and
> against it.  If people find Haskell useful for scripting, then it is a
> scripting language.  No need to be offended.

It _does_ have a meaning, if only anyone cared.  Some discussion
here just in the last couple days that explored use of Haskell for
scripting, and it's really quite an interesting notion though
apparently far from practical at this time.

Interesting because, among other reasons, a scripting language
is aimed at people whose expertise is in the scripted application,
not so much the theory and practice of computer programming, and
Haskell seems to the casual observer very heavy on the latter.
My guess is it isn't necessarily that bad - you might have to
understand the type system well enough to implement an instance
of Ord, for example, but you wouldn't need that the first day.
You'd have to get used to the IO monad the first day, though.

	Donn