[lug] OT, Functional Languages

[Jeffrey Haemer]

Hey, I'm told that that the functional language about to take over is OCaml.
:-)

I suspect that one important reason for the failure of Darcs was that it was
written in Haskell.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything intrinsically wrong with Haskell,
or that shortcomings of the language design contributed.

More books are written in English than in Vietnamese.  Trying to explain
this by comparing the relative merits of English and Vietnamese grammar may
not be the right approach. :-)

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:04 AM, Steve Sullivan <sullivan at mathcom.com>wrote:

> The following is my own experience ... YMMV
>
> I've used Haskell and Lisp, both many years ago, and the
> hype from the functional people is always the same - these
> languages are going to take over real soon now.
>
> The Haskell community seems to be particularly enthusiastic.
> I have to say it is a beautiful language, but complex
> and difficult.  It was designed by a large committee who
> apparently couldn't say "no" to any feature.
> Perhaps the Haskell enthusiasm comes partly from having
> mastered such a hard to use tool.
>
> The difficulty with functional languages is they have no real
> representation of state.  Try writing a file or updating a
> database in Haskell.  They can do it but the mental and
> programming machinery to do so are amazingly convoluted.
>
> I think the functional languages will continue to be used
> in niche markets, but for most programming we'll continue
> to use languages that handle state changes better.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:06:28PM -0700, Stephen Queen wrote:
> > On one of the forums I read on a regular basis, I see where a lot of
> > developers think that functional languages such as Haskell, Erlang,
> > and Lisp are going to be the languages to watch in the near future.
> >
> > I was wondering if anybody on this list had any experience with theses
> > functional languages, and/or had any comments?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Steve
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell]
303-997-1219 [Grand Central]
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