On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
How do people stumble on Haskell? I've taught ML at UPenn, and many
For some diversity ... For years I'd been using (and largely happy with) pure fortran with a little tcl thrown in for scripting. I'd played around with a few other languages for kicks (Java, Lisp, c++), but never really found anything to pull me away from fortran for good: it's easy, insanely portable, and code I wrote in 1988 still works without modification. About 2 years ago I ran into a stability problem while taking numeric derivatives. In a moment of inspired procrastination, instead of properly fixing the problem I decided that I needed 'automatic differentiation'. Google. A series of fantastic papers by Jerzy Karczmarczuk. Wow. Google. GHC. Can't get it installed on my mac laptop. Stop. Months pass. (probably more like a year) In a later moment of procrastination, I find John Hughes' "Why functional programming matters". After seeing Romberg integration implemented in a handful of lines, I was hooked. But the real kicker was the performance of GHC -- after getting it installed I benchmarked the Hughes's code against a Fortran integrator. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the execution times were within a factor of a few of each other (I was expecting 2-3 orders of magnitude). While I'm not yet entirely sold on the practicality of the language (things move very fast, and it seems to be very difficult for me to stick with haskell98), it's just too much fun to not use. I'm now using it daily in a scripting role and one-offs, and I'm seriously considering using it over fortran in a new workstation analysis code. (Actually, the 'fun' aspect of it is providing a just a *bit* of motivation ...) Cheers, -david k. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
