"D. Tweed" wrote:
> Another reason for the popularity of Perl is that it's _popular_ &
> _ubiquitous_. Although I like Haskell and some other languages (e.g.,
> Mathematica, python, even C++) more than Perl, when I want to produce
> something that I hope other people in my lab will use/contribute fixes to,
> Perl's what I use (with much swearing & looking up in the manual). There's
> only a few machines with a Haskell system available on them, whereas
> everything has a Perl interpreter installed, and few people who are
> comfortable with the language.
That true, there are other contributing factors. Look and the following
list, and notice how ever point is in striking contrast to Haskell:
- Perl has one implementation
- The implementation is rather lightweight *and* reasonable efficient
- A large class of problems can be solved %90 very quickly with Perl
- Perl has a _very_ complete library, including _all_ of unix api
- The language has remained fairly stable
- In the begining Perl advotates would tirelessly answer every question in
comp.unix with some Perl code that answered the question
- Perl is easy to install and is omnipresent
Notice that the language itself is far from the whole story. In fact, while
the language "features" will get you 90% of the solution fairly quickly, I
know from professional experience that maintaining Perl scripts written by
others can be a living nightmare and that the Quick'N'Dirty style promoted by
Perl _will_ bite you in the end.
> Of course, what can be done to help the start an epidemic `infecting'
> people & machines with Haskell I don't know...
Apart from the obvious of engineering better implementations and more
complete libraries, we could publish code that solves common problems.
Unfortunately it takes time to do properly, and in contrast to Perl, Haskell
really shines on larger problems...
/Tommy
