3 ms·

I've always found that attitude slightly strange. Having expended a lot of time and effort learning a functional language, why not program in it?

• almost 18y ago
  Because sometimes it isn't right for the job? Haskell is absolutely awesome for some things (probably quite a lot of things in fact) but for some other things it's maybe not optimal. It's a lot of fun though, and if even it does nothing but stretch your mind to some new ways of doing things then it's very much worth learning.
  • ionfish 18y ago
    Sometimes is a long way from never. The relevant phrase here is "not to program in"; you clearly agree with me that this is a mistaken attitude.
    • Periodic 18y ago
      I meant "not necessarily to program in". E.g. it's not going to be something you use all the time. The sad fact is that a lot of existing code and companies use fairly safe languages like C and Java, but simply knowing how to think about functional programming will help you out with all your programming, no matter the language.
      • banned_man 18y ago
        I'm curious why you consider C to be safe but Haskell not. Seeing as C has no bounds checking on arrays, runtime type-checking, or garbage collection, I'm tempted to argue to the contrary.
        • science4sail 18y ago
          I'm guessing that Periodic means "safe" in terms of popularity and visibility, not ease of programming.
• Periodic 18y ago
  Do it every chance you get! It's just that you can't always program with a fun functional language. The hardest part is in collaboration with people who have been using C for 10+ years and aren't interested in other things. Fortunately we have standards for linking object files together independent of their source language.
  • eru 18y ago
    Yes. And still you have to live with their restrictions e.g. cope with manual memory management, at least on the interface to C.
• dasil003 18y ago
  Not to mention the impossibility of learning a language without actually programming in it.