Impressed

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, July 28, 2012 09:58:58 Stuart wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 July 2012 at 07:45:20 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen
> 
> wrote:
> > On 28-07-2012 09:36, Stuart wrote:
> >> On Friday, 27 July 2012 at 21:59:33 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> >>> - Scheme
> >>> - Haskell
> >>> - OCaml
> >>> - F#
> >>> - Erlang
> >>> - Clojure
> >>> - Some C and C++ compilers (gcc, Intel, MSVC in release mode)
> >>> - Most commercial Lisp compilers
> >> 
> >> So, as I said, nothing you can write a real program in -
> >> except possibly
> >> for F#. The possibility of "some" C compilers supporting it
> >> doesn't mean
> >> you can rely on the feature being present.
> > 
> > Are you serious........?
> 
> Uh, yeah? Aside from C (which doesn't always support tail call
> optimisation), and F#, none of these languages would seem to have
> any purpose on a desktop computer. I don't know of any way, in
> this day and age, to write application software (e.g. Notepad)
> for a 32 or 64-bit Windows 7 machine, in goddamn Haskell. I may
> be mistaken.

Oh, you can do it. There's no question of that. For instance, you can use 
wxhaskell to do your GUI. However, how _sane_ it is is another matter 
entirely. I've done a fair bit of programming in haskell and quite like the 
language (it has the best parsing library that I've ever used), but debugging 
it is a royal pain thanks to the fact that it's a lazy language, and I don't 
know how you could sanely do more than small programs with it. People 
definitely do it though.

- Jonathan M Davis