Re:Resigning from the Haskell Platform
by exDM69 on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @04:54AM
(#10379217)
Haskell is a programming language, it's just a tool - just like you don't expect some profound practical advantages from, say Python, C# or Rust, you should not expect Haskell to be magically better than others.
That being said, Haskell has been at the forefront of programming language research since its inception in the 1980s. It may be more academic kind of advances but things have trickled down to mainstream languages, e.g. F# and C# have had influences from Haskell (particularly because Simon Peyton-Jones is employed by Microsoft Research). Scala and other languages have had some influence too. Things such as Parser combinators have emerged from the Haskell world and have been adopted to many programming languages since.
Haskell is exciting because it takes a no-compromises approach to the paradigm it is based on. It's purely functional and lazy, something not taken to such extremes in any prior languages. Whether this is the right(tm) approach to take is open to debate.
If I had to summarize in one sentence: Haskell is a research language that is practical - learning it will make you a better programmer even if you never get the opportunity to use it in your day job.
Re:Resigning from the Haskell Platform
by fho on Tuesday October 13, 2015 @08:29AM
(#10379908)
Just another Haskell-influence on mainstream languages: Pythons list-comprehensions are verbatim copied from Haskell. This is even acknowledged here: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonVsHaskell
That being said, Haskell has been at the forefront of programming language research since its inception in the 1980s. It may be more academic kind of advances but things have trickled down to mainstream languages, e.g. F# and C# have had influences from Haskell (particularly because Simon Peyton-Jones is employed by Microsoft Research). Scala and other languages have had some influence too. Things such as Parser combinators have emerged from the Haskell world and have been adopted to many programming languages since.
Haskell is exciting because it takes a no-compromises approach to the paradigm it is based on. It's purely functional and lazy, something not taken to such extremes in any prior languages. Whether this is the right(tm) approach to take is open to debate.
If I had to summarize in one sentence: Haskell is a research language that is practical - learning it will make you a better programmer even if you never get the opportunity to use it in your day job.