Re: [Haskell-cafe] Toy application advice wanted
Mike, I'm evaluating several high-level languages as development vehicles for our next suite of applications. .. just code some really simple problems. Like the Sieve of Eratosthenes, in all three languages. Or a simple publish/subscribe framework with a "master" state holder and many slaves. Or quicksort. Etc. etc. I would be careful about using your experience with these toy programs as an indication of how suitable functional languages (and lazy ones in-particular) are as 'development vehicles' for your applications. A functional programmer's idea of a 'toy' program tends to be somewhat different from a C++/GUI programmers one. Lazy functional languages lend themselves nicely to parsing, list processing, search trees and the like - but if you're planning to load a wave file, apply a filter and then display the result on the screen .. then let's just say that you've got an adventure ahead of you, and it's not going to take 2 weeks. ... as far as GUIs are concerned, check out http://www.haskell.org/libraries and look at how many seperate GUI libraries there are - I counted 16 - then ask what made the developer for the 16th one choose to start over. Haskell is lazy all the time. That's awfully nice...I'm not sure if there's a performance penalty somewhere, but assuming there isn't, kudos to it. There is.. and its name is 'space leak'.. and the function mapAccumL :: (acc -> x -> (acc, y)) -> acc -> [x] -> (acc, [y]) is by far the most elegant way of expressing it :) BTW: I've just dedicated the next 3 years of my life to trying to write non-toy programs in lazy functional languages... "adventure" is the operative word.. not "can't". Ben. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Toy application advice wanted
On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 11:27:41PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, but I talked to a friend who has similar > feelings but is actually pretty good at Common Lisp. He suggested I > refocus my energies, and I agree: instead of biting off more than I can > chew, and having to learn a whole wad of APIs that aren't really about the > language (read: wxHaskell or gtk2hs/the like, or audio packages etc.), > just code some really simple problems. > > Like the Sieve of Eratosthenes, in all three languages. Or a simple > publish/subscribe framework with a "master" state holder and many slaves. > Or quicksort. Etc. etc. > > So I'm going to head down that path right now, and try to get a feel for > the languages in a slightly more pure fashion. I'll still try to get > performance metrics out of them, but I'm not going to bang my head against > the wall learning new languages, GUI toolkits, and FFIs all in two weeks. I think that sounds like a good idea (not doing a GUI just yet) but would recommend that perhaps you could do something pretty impure in terms of file or directory browsing. That wouldn't involve going beyond the standard libraries, but might give you some idea of the expressive power of the languages in terms of IO actions. I'm thinking something like a recursive grep, or wc -l... except preferably a bit more tailored to the sort of IO you'll have to do in your actual application. I guess the trick would be in finding something tough enough, since wc -l would be something like a two-liner... -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
