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(Author here.) I find it odd that everyone thinks the remark is a criticism of Lisp. It's a criticism of Haskell. Lisp had a good excuse for focusing on linked
by earthboundkid 14y ago
(Author here.) I find it odd that everyone thinks the remark is a criticism of Lisp. It's a criticism of Haskell. Lisp had a good excuse for focusing on linked lists back in the day. Then Clojure improved on it by promoting hashes to first class constructs. But Haskell is stuck in the past, at least as far as first class syntax goes.
- FreeFull 14y agoThe only thing that elevates lists above other data structures in Haskell syntax-wise is the "" and [] sugar for constructing them. Haskell's type system allows you very easily to construct your own data types. For example, an unbalanced binary tree would be defined as data Tree a = Leaf a | Branch a (Tree a) (Tree a) deriving (Eq, Show) I admit that the easiest way to construct a hashmap, using fromList [(key,value),(otherkey,othervalue)], isn't as pretty as Clojure's syntax.