[Haskell-cafe] help me evangelize haskell.

[Mathew de Detrich]

If they are perl programmers, they (should) understand perl very well. I
would suggest to try explaining to them the obvious disadvantages of perl
and the way that Haskell can cover those disadvantages without (much) of a
compromise.

Perl programs are either ones that are ridiculously short/concise, these are
one off scripts that become impossible to maintain (and even to read apart
from whoever coded the script). These perl scripts are typically shorter
then the equivalent Haskell ones. The other type of Perl scripts are the
ones that are fairly concise, and at least more maintainable/scalable. These
perl scripts tend to be the same size as the Haskell ones, except the
Haskell ones are type safe, have error checking and are much more
maintainable/scalable (the slideshow earlier with DonS shows this). Odds are
that the company probably has the latter of Perl scripts, so if you can show
them how Haskell can be just as excise (but not as extremely concise)
however have a lot more other benefits that will help a lot.

Another thing you can say is that Perl is a very extreme language in design
where as Haskell is more "general". This means the one thing Perl does, it
does very well (expressing programming problems in the most concise/short
possible way) but it has to sacrifice for it massively in other areas which
end up costing much more in the long run. Most 'real' world problems do not
require that amount of brevity, considering the massive cost that Perl
brings for such a thing.

Also show them quickcheck as well

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 2:38 AM, Michael Litchard <michael at schmong.org>wrote:

> I'll be starting a new job soon as systems tool guy. The shop is a
> perl shop as far as internal automation tasks go. But I am fortunate
> to not be working with bigots. If they see a better way, they'll take
> to it. So please give me your best arguments in favor of using haskell
> for task automation instead of perl, or awk or any of those scripting
> lanugages.
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