Things I Learned from ACCU 2010

[Clemens]

Walter Bright Wrote:

> Clemens wrote:
> > Ah, ok. As bearophile noted, that person seems to have not much experience
> > with Haskell, to put it politely. Obviously I didn't see the presentation and
> > don't want to judge too harshly, but if your summary is an accurate
> > representation of its take-away points, that reeks badly of intellectual
> > dishonesty and FUD. See my link.
> > 
> > Or put another way, would you like someone who has never used D before to do
> > a live presentation on it and come to premature conclusions like this?
> 
> 
> D is meant to give good results even for people who are not experts at it. If 
> someone wrote a straightforward D app and it gave such poor results, I'd take it 
> (and have taken such) as a problem that D needs to improve upon.

Someone coming from C++ might think the following program entirely reasonable (and I did indeed make this mistake when starting with D):

class A
{
    this() { /* initialize me */ }
    void foo() { /* do smth */ }
}

void main()
{
    A a;
    a.foo();      // blam - segfault right here
}

This is about the level of understanding that seems to have been applied to Haskell in that example.

> I will send your link to Russel, I'm sure he'd be interested.
> 
> I am also interested in *why* Russel's Pi program is a bad example of Haskell 
> programming, it's not enough to dismiss it because Russel is not a Haskell expert.
> 

I tried to have a look at it (not that I'm anything near a Haskell expert), but this link just gives me an empty directory:
http://www.russel.org.uk/Bazaar/Pi_Quadrature