Women in Technology

Article:		What I Hate About Your Programming Language
Subject:		Haskell
Date:		2003-05-13 16:18:53
From:		anonymous2
Definitely learn Haskell if you want to get a look at a very strongly-typed language. It's also a pure lazy functional language, which is great for broadening the horizons (not many functional languages are as obsessively pure as Haskell). Sure, the typing system can get really irritating at times, but after a while I found it very useful for catching bugs at compile time instead of runtime - if the types don't match, often it means you're attempting to do something that you shouldn't be doing. If you are going to learn Haskell though, make sure you learn about monads. They're absolutely invaluable.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Haskell
  2003-05-13 23:38:01  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Cynical thought. What's funny is when COBOL first came out it advertised largely the same benefits. Quoting from Haskell.org:
  
  * Substantially increased programmer productivity (Ericsson measured an improvement factor of between 9 and 25 in one set of experiments on telephony software).
  * Shorter, clearer, and more maintainable code.
  Fewer errors, higher reliability.
  * A smaller "semantic gap" between the programmer and the language.
  * Shorter lead times.
  
• Haskell
  2003-05-14 10:19:08  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  That's dumb. Yes, COBOL advertised those benefits, but, WITHIN ITS INTENDED DOMAIN (fixed-structure record-processing) there're very few languages that can touch it. COBOL is very good at what it's designed to do; the fact that it's original purpose is largely obsolete doesn't translate their claims into a counterargument against Haskell (or anything else for that matter).