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> I think you should really be pushing more for SML or Haskell or something like that. There are two clues in this sentence (mentioning SML and not OCAML, "som

> I think you should really be pushing more for SML or Haskell or something like that. There are two clues in this sentence (mentioning SML and not OCAML, "something like that") that suggest you do not regularly program in a "something like that" language. I wrote my first Haskell program over a decade ago. I find Haskell very hard to read. The grammar is very complicated[1] and is actually context-sensitive[2]. [1] https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10.html https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10... [2] http://trevorjim.com/haskell-is-not-context-free/ http://trevorjim.com/haskell-is-not-context-free/

c3534l 9y ago
I do like OCaml, but have never had the opportunity to write more than a few toy programs for fun. I put SML in there just to be like "and other ML-family functional programming languages." Haskell is complicated, but some complication is needed and that's more of a learning-curve problem. If humans were capable of simple, we'd all be typing 1s and 0s. We do better with grouping, context, similar things being similar and dissimilar things being dissimilar. I don't think Lisp is the way forward for functional programming.
- sedachv 9y ago
  > Haskell is complicated, but some complication is needed and that's more of a learning-curve problem. That is a junk argument. No one needs context-sensitive grammars. I think designing a language that cannot be parsed with an LL(1) or LALR parser is just dumb. It guarantees that your compiler will be slow right from the start. In addition that applies to all the tooling - syntax highlighting and navigation in the editor, linters, pretty-printers, etc. And in practice the tooling is not just slow but also has a ton of bugs around corner cases.