Haskell [Was: Re: A few comments about D]

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:j32mti$15tp$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Caligo:
>
>> Haskell is one of the most beautiful languages. I wish I had discovered 
>> it sooner.
>
> I am now able to write small Haskell programs. It has some features and 
> parts that I like significantly (and I'd like some of them in D too!), but 
> so far I am not appreciating it much on the whole. It feels almost like a 
> "puzzle language", as Forth (almost, but not really). Those operators are 
> not easy to find in the documentation, the purpose of all those little 
> functions is not easy to remember, and its obsession with purity sometimes 
> turns easy things into very complex things (I like purity and 
> immutability, but not much inside functions, so I prefer D). It's good for 
> some kinds of tasks (Euler Puzzles, certain math tasks, certain 
> experiments about types), acceptable for other tasks (some generic 
> algorithms, some string processing, etc), and bad for many other purposes, 
> so it doesn't feel like a general purpose language. I am sometimes able to 
> write very short programs with it, but often they are slow. It's not easy 
> for me to tell how much efficient a program will be, once compiled with 
> GHC. Keep in mind that I am a newbie of Haskell, so don't take my comments 
> too much seriously :-)
>

Totally agree (and I like your comparion to Forth and the description 
"puzzle language"). Haskell is what proved to me that functional programming 
should be a feature of an imperative language, but not the fundamental 
nature of a language. (FWIW, Smalltalk (and to a much lesser extent, Java) 
proved the same to me about OO...and LISP with lists...JS with 
minimalism...ok, I'll stop now...Basically I just don't like 
pure/"beautiful" languages. They're pretty, but not practical.)