3 ms·

> The best programming language is the most accurate algorithmic notation system. Actually, the best programming language is the one you're programming in righ

by yladiz 10y ago

> The best programming language is the most accurate algorithmic notation system. Actually, the best programming language is the one you're programming in right now. /s Although my comment is in jest, I do think it has a lot of truth; I'm never going to write something for HPC in Haskell just because it has better algorithmic notation, I'd most likely choose Fortran or C. I'm not going to write a web back end in Haskell, I'm going to write it in Python, Ruby, Javascript, or any other language much better suited for the application. I'm not going to write statistical model analysis in Haskell, I'm going to write it in R, Python, Matlab, or Mathematica. Saying that all programming languages are just little more than notation systems for algorithms doesn't actually reflect reality that programming languages are not just math operations, even if that's what they become in the compiler or to the CPU, and telling people that is disrespecting the entire industry and academic side of programming and computer science.

jolux 10y ago
Haskell is equally suited to backend web development as Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Just look at Yesod. There's nothing about Haskell that makes it worse for web development, and a lot that makes it better. For what it's worth, Haskell has uses in finance for statistical modeling because you can model different currencies and equities/derivatives with ADTs and the type system will ensure you never confuse them in your code. Haskell syntax is beautiful and in many cases mimics mathematical syntax and as such is used frequently by mathematicians. But I don't mean this to be a defense of Haskell. There are many posts that do it better, just yesterday there was a blog post on the front page about one startup's use of Haskell in its main product: http://baatz.io/posts/haskell-in-a-startup/ http://baatz.io/posts/haskell-in-a-startup/ There are other languages like Lisp that directly imitate lambda calculus. Lisp is elegant because it is like programming in a syntax tree with the entire structure of the tree available for manipulation such that you can create extremely concise and expressive programs with less code.

by yladiz 10y ago

jolux 10y ago

Haskell is equally suited to backend web development as Python, Ruby, or JavaScript. Just look at Yesod. There's nothing about Haskell that makes it worse for web development, and a lot that makes it better. For what it's worth, Haskell has uses in finance for statistical modeling because you can model different currencies and equities/derivatives with ADTs and the type system will ensure you never confuse them in your code. Haskell syntax is beautiful and in many cases mimics mathematical syntax and as such is used frequently by mathematicians. But I don't mean this to be a defense of Haskell. There are many posts that do it better, just yesterday there was a blog post on the front page about one startup's use of Haskell in its main product: http://baatz.io/posts/haskell-in-a-startup/ http://baatz.io/posts/haskell-in-a-startup/ There are other languages like Lisp that directly imitate lambda calculus. Lisp is elegant because it is like programming in a syntax tree with the entire structure of the tree available for manipulation such that you can create extremely concise and expressive programs with less code.