On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Mark Carter wrote: > This is not a troll, honest, so please bear with me ... > > I'm a C/C++/VBA programmer (although the former 2 are several years old > for me), with a sprinkling of Python. Needless to say, I was looking to > see if there were any better ways of doing things. I've given things > like Ruby and Scheme a bit of peck, and failed to get particularly > enthusiastic about them. Two very interesting choices, though, appear to > be Lisp and Haskell. It struck me that Lisp was, perhaps, the Ultimate > Programming Language, the One True Language to rule them all; except > that I always kept abandoning it for one reason or another (fiddly > installation, lack of libraries, compatability problems, cost, possible > license issues, etc.). My current foray in Haskell seems encouraging. > wxHaskell installed a breeze, and seems quite usable (even though I'm a > raw n00b to the language, and admittedly haven't grokked the semantics, > and all this <cid:part1.01000702.09000407@yahoo.co.uk> IO a -> IO () > business). On the one hand, it seems kinda academic, but on the other, > it looks like it wants to be practical, too. > > Bearing this in mind, and hoping you can see where I'm coming from, I > think my question is: shouldn't you guys be using Lisp?
As someone else that has been learning both Haskell and Lisp, I think you should really look at Haskell as a wonderful experiment. Essentially, while Lisp can do pretty much anything, it isn't perfect and shouldn't be the last word., I don't think we should be satisfied with a language just the way it is. Haskell is very, very different than most languages. It's *purely* functional and lazy evaluating. The latter is most interesting to me from the compiler writing aspect. When I have a little more free time and a little more experience I'd love to have a deeper look at ghc and understand how it works. In essence though, I think that Haskell is worth learning simply because it tries something different. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
