On 09/11/2012 08:16 AM, Dennis Raddle wrote:
I went briefly to Python but guess what? I I U-turned right back to Haskell. Because there is nothing like the consistent documentation and well-thought-out libraries of Haskell. There is nothing else like the help from #haskell or this list. ^This, right here, is one of the strongest things Haskell has going for it. I'm learning Haskell too and I love how active the community is, how helpful the documentation is, and how robust the technologies coming out of it generally are. I don't know why I haven't experienced this with another language before, but you search "haskell" in the search engine, immediately click on the Haskell Wiki, and enter a pretty website filled with everything Haskell related. The two books that you can learn Haskell from are free online, the #haskell channel chats long into the night long after all my other channels have dissipated, the subreddit and stackexchange get used, and the mailing lists are very informative and helpful. Not to mention the language itself is amazingly versatile, expressive, and robust. Then there is the fact that GHC manages to compile this awesomeness into something that's actually fast AND there is GHCi in case you want it. I'm sure there are things that Haskell simply isn't made to do, but that's like criticizing duct tape because it's not a duck.
This made me think that it could be much more effective to develop AI in a functional language. There's no way I could do this with Haskell presently as I am still struggling to approach all problems from the FP perspective first, but I do think there is the potential. There is a lot of potential here in my opinion. The two language families that have built their reputations through their use in AI research, Lisp and Prolog, share a lot in common with Haskell. AI, along with a lot of the big problems out there, seem to always boil down to
On 09/11/2012 04:21 PM, Darren Grant wrote: parallel relationships between sets of data in a model rather than sequential object-oriented recipes. I would not be surprised if functional languages like Haskell supersede many of the imperative languages because of these problem sets. Sometimes I think I'm stupid to say that, but then I remember what SQL and RDBMS's did for the database world. - Michael