Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Alistair Bayley wrote:
On 08/10/2007, Henning Thielemann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You cannot turn any programmer into a disciplined programmer just by
giving him a well designed language. I you try so, they will not
like to
use that language, will leave that language as soon as possible or they
try to adapt the language to their style of programming.
Well, I wasn't suggesting you'll create great programmers overnight,
but you might expect that their appreciation of good design might
improve after some Haskell exposure. Also, Haskell simply doesn't
support some of the things that are common causes of errors in the
enterprisey-language world. I recall reading something about one of
the most common causes of errors in novice programs being type errors
(presumably, once they'd got the program to compile i.e. there were no
syntactic errors). And I'm under the (possibly mistaken) impression
that some of the common errors non-novice programmers make are
aliasing bugs, and/or use of global variables. Does anyone have
references to studies confirming (or refuting) this?
Thus, what happens today? People ask Haskell-Cafe how to implement
global variables and they are advised to use IORefs and
unsafePerformIO, although the better answer is: "Why do you want to do
this?" Even "Tackling the awkward squad" considers unsafePerformIO an
acceptable tool for handling global configuration files.
I know of lots of people who proclaim that "Linux sux" because it isn't
Windoze. I can well imagine hords of impatient Java programmers decrying
Haskell because it isn't Java. ("It's not even OO, man!")
Haskell is many things, but few would seriously claim it to be the
silver bullet to effortlessly writing bug-free code.
(Indeed, the number of times my Haskell programs have locked up due to
me accidentally writing let x = foo x...)
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