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One sentence in the article made me do a double take: "reasonably tightly optimized low-level Haskell". For I minute I thought that this defeats the whole purpo
by jasperry 11y ago
One sentence in the article made me do a double take: "reasonably tightly optimized low-level Haskell". For I minute I thought that this defeats the whole purpose of using Haskell, because for me it's all about being able to code at a higher level of abstraction.
But when I saw how quickly he fixed the problem, I reconsidered. As wrong as low-level tweaking in a high-level language feels, if it's still less work to optimize than in C or Java, that's a win, right?
- bos 11y agoI think of programming in Haskell as being more about being able to choose a level of abstraction that makes sense for the situation. The more abstract code is great when it works well, and when it falters I can easily drop down to something more concrete, or even to C, and still have most of my code benefit from that higher level of thinking.
- mcguire 11y agoSomeone with more experience can correct me, but "low-level Haskell" is Haskell that takes into consideration things like evaluation order and thunks. It is stuff that many other languages would still consider way-high-level.
- jkarni 11y agoEvaluation-order in a sense is more low-level in Haskell.