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What I'd like to understand: When/why does one choose Haskell over other functional languages e.g. F# or OCaml? It looks to me like they would satisfy the same
by wombat23 6y ago
What I'd like to understand: When/why does one choose Haskell over other functional languages e.g. F# or OCaml?
It looks to me like they would satisfy the same points that the article makes.
Edit: just did a quick comparison of the last 2 SO developer surveys, and it looks like Haskell "replaced" F# in their popularity ranking last year.
- nudpiedo 6y agoall them are equally competent languages. F# with corporative support and a giant ecosysten, ocaml being very fast and portable and haskell being very... special and pure.
- wombat23 6y agoThanks for your reply! I see the corporate aspect of F#, but can you elaborate on what you mean by "special" about Haskell?
- chriswarbo 6y agoHaskell's laziness and purity can make it a bit trickier to use constructs that are common in ML-like (or Scheme-like) languages, like mutable variables. This nudges Haskell libraries in a slightly different direction, e.g. making more use of control structures like monads, arrows, continuations, etc. which authors in other languages wouldn't reach for so readily. This has an effect on the ecosystem, since people want their systems and libraries to be compatible with each other's APIs. The result is that "the Haskell way" can seem a little more intimidating than the more "pragmatic" approach of MLs. (I write this as someone who writes a lot of Haskell, and dabbles in StandardML!)