There may be something to this point of view. On the other hand, it is easier for me to see examples that can connect back to something I am already familiar with.
That said, I will mention something where perl *seemed* to be a fit, but later proved frustrating. To whit -- Doing something at the shell level, in parallel. Ideally, in such a way that it could scale to, for example, multiple processes on a multi processor box, or even distributed map-reduce using a botnet. I just couldn't figure out a good way to do this in perl, despite a recently published map-reduce module to the CPAN. It all just seemed to get icky. I couldn't "plug in" my bits of finished code in the way I would have liked to, forking and other fiddly bits just seemed to get in the way. Now, this is probably largely due to my inexperience with "parallel" thinking. However, I think part of it is also the limitations in the language. My simple task was to download a bunch of urls. This could be done with wget. What I got frustrated with was, speeding this up by doing things in parallel. There are a number of modules on the CPAN that purport to help with this... parallel fork manager... parallel web user agent... others... but things got messy fast, even through the core task (fetch a url) was extremely simple. That is something that got me thinking. So, an example to take a simple task (eg web fetch, but could be something else), and then scale it to work in parallel -- with threads, with map reduce, howsoever -- might be a good show of haskell's strehgths. I think there was even a post to haskell cafe about this today. To recap: transform a piece of simple code that works in serial, so it works in parallel. Maybe even a couple, or three ways: using forks, using threads, using map reduce. Compare and contrast this with doing the same transformation in perl. Perl should be messier. Hope this helps... 2007/4/16, Dougal Stanton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
On 16/04/07, Thomas Hartman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Maybe that could be simplified and something could be based on that. > > A one-liner using PCRE regex might also be of use. > Unless it can be performed with astounding dexterity, I don't think try to beat, for example, Perl at its own game will produce worthwhile results. What, instead, is Haskell's unique selling point? Non-strictness? Purity? Optional, composable, computation styles (ie, drop-in monads for non-determinism, continuations, state etc)? Succinct and elegant syntax? Something else? Cheers, D. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
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