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A comment on Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (2011). Parent comment

Re:Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (... by virtualwhys on Monday March 31, 2014 @03:18AM (#7500109)
Sorry, it's not an opinion, it's a fact ;-)

Why? NPEs are easily solved, even for beginners. Stack trace says blah blah blah occurred at line X in class Y. Easy fix, totally low hanging fruit for beginners and experts alike.

The space leak issue, OTH, may be easily avoided (if one is well versed in Haskell best practices), but resolving them when they occur is something else entirely. Seriously, you have to break out a memory profiler in order to find out where the issue _may be_, not exactly where it is on line X of class Y.

So, yes, I never get them (in Scala), but I'll stand by taking an NPE over a space leak any day of the week.

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Re:Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (... by efnx on Monday March 31, 2014 @02:37PM (#7503279)
thirsteh summed up my feelings in his response to your comment but I'd also like to add that a preference is an opinion and not a fact. You may prefer apples over oranges. It is not a fact that apples are better than oranges.

For instance, what if your null pointer in language x causes a silent fail? Now your apples are beginning to look like oranges.

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Re:Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (... by thirsteh on Monday March 31, 2014 @10:04AM (#7501502)
This is really quite silly since the choice between NullPointerExceptions and space leaks is a false one. You can have both in either language.
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