[Haskell-cafe] SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award

[Alexander Solla]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 2:00 AM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com>wrote:

>
> > More seriously, the influence of Haskell over F# (and even Python) is
> undoubted, but do you really think Haskell influenced Java Generics? (IMHO
> they were more inspired from C++ templates)
> > (That is a question, not an assertion).
>
> Phil Wadler had a hand in designing both Haskell and Java Generics I
> believe.
>

As far as I understand, Java/C# Generics and C++ templates "are" merely
keywords around what we Haskellers call "parametric polymorphism".  In other
words, our type language is rich enough to express types like:

stringConcat :: [String] -> String

and

concat :: Monoid a => [a] -> a

using the "same" typing language, whereas the C-style languages require
annotations.  (You can probably guess which I prefer.  I don't need keywords
to tell me what the code describes, then the code describes it so clearly)

I can't find any literature that specifically credits
functional languages for the feature, but Bjarne Stoustrup
himself acknowledges that functional programmers would tend to find template
metaprogramming easier than others.  He was probably aware of functional
implementations (Haskell?  Miranda? ML?) when he said that.

I don't see the connection between Haskell's typeful programming and Python.
 List comprehensions are set-builder-notation-like syntactic sugar for
lists.  I didn't use them in Python and I don't use them in Haskell.
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