4 ms·
Why Haskell, and why not just write it in Lisp? It appears Lisp has proven itself consistently, at solving difficult problems.
by blackrock 6y ago
Why Haskell, and why not just write it in Lisp?
It appears Lisp has proven itself consistently, at solving difficult problems.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoI've been paid to write Lisp most of my career. Most new languages I check out seem like some variant of C or a dumbed-down version of Lisp. Haskell is the only one that seems like an actual upgrade from Lisp, in that there are things you can do in Haskell that would be quite difficult to shoehorn into Lisp without changing Lisp in fundamental ways. (A statement I never thought I would make before I found Haskell.) The full panoply of monads for example. Automatic currying for another. A true lambda-functional language that does not need parentheses and makes no compromises for their absence for yet another. All this does not make me want to abandon Lisp for Haskell; Lisp is still more practical for most of my needs. But if I had to write a parser I'd probably first write it in Haskell and then translate it to Lisp, because Haskell expands the way you think about hard programming problems -- even beyond the realm to which Lisp expands it.
- shigeo 6y agoOut of curiosity, how and how often do you make use of Haskell's laziness, and how often does it get in your way? And yes, the syntax of Haskell (besides unary minus) really does feel like it's close to some kind of optimum.
- 08-15 6y agoNo types, but implicit side effects everywhere. Also, recursive functions blow the stack (in Lisp, not in Scheme).