[Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

This would be a great discussion for the haskell-café list, but perhaps it's less appropriate on the low-bandwidth Haskell list.

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: haskell-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Michael Vanier
| Sent: 16 September 2005 22:37
| To: tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com
| Cc: haskell at haskell.org; glynn at gclements.plus.com
| Subject: Re: [Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell versus Lisp
| 
| 
| > Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:33:46 +0200
| > From: Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com>
| >
| > On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 05:40:04PM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
| > >
| > > Every other language (including Haskell) tends to have the problem
| > > that eventually you will encounter a situation where the language's
| > > own worldview gets in the way.
| >
| > Are you sure that lisp's worldview never gets in the way?
| >
| > > Or, to put it another way: if Haskell is so flexible, why do we need
| > > Template Haskell?
| >
| > It's nice to have Template Haskell, but saying that we need it is a bit
| > of an overstatement. In the GHC Survey 2005 only 9% of people said it's
| > essential. Well, OK, I was one of them, but I think you know what I
| > mean.
| >
| > > I can't imagine a "Template Lisp"; it would just be Lisp.
| >
| > The power of lisp macros is often overrated. I remember a long
| > discussion crossposted on comp.lang.lisp an comp.lang.functional. The
| > lisp advocates gave examples for how macros allow to do things
| > supposedly unavailable in other languages. Surprisingly, most of these
| > things were equally easy to do with higher-order functions and closures
| > in Haskell.
| >
| 
| But were they as efficient?  The beauty of macros is that a lot of things
| can be done with no run-time overhead at all.  Not that I'm taking a stand
| on the Haskell-vs-Lisp argument; I think everyone should learn both
| languages.
| 
| Mike
| 
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