[Haskell-cafe] help me evangelize haskell.

[Alexander Solla]

On Sep 5, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Mathew de Detrich wrote:

> 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.

That doesn't sound right to me.  Perl's biggest weaknesses are  
traditionally:  (i) the syntax:  but those $'s and @'s are actually  
type annotations;  and (ii) "There's More Then One Way to Do It":  the  
existence of multiple approaches to solving a problem, instead of an  
"official" obvious choice.  This means that every programmer on the  
team either has to KNOW all the possible ways to solve a problem with  
Perl, or the programming team has to CHOOSE one and make it "policy"  
-- effectively picking out the nicest bits and sticking to that sub- 
language.

Depending on your point of view, Haskell does not compare particularly  
favorably with respect to "TMTOWTDI".  The whole Control.* hierarchy  
is the construction of custom control structures.  That's the whole  
point of "glue" languages.  You write custom control structures to  
support the chosen normal forms for expressing data and computations.