On Wed, 25 Nov 2015 13:37:30 +0100, Dennis Raddle
But what if someone came along and said, "Well, conciseness isn't all that important. Having to type more isn't much of a drawback -- it doesn't really increase the time it takes to write a program once you consider that there is a greater time spent in requirements collection, overall design, debugging, and documentation. The real drawback of concise/expressive Haskell is the difficulty in understanding and using it fluently. Ultimately Haskell is just mathematicians having fun, but not very practical."
It is not just the amount of work with the keyboard; it also takes more time thinking about details if you don't have the conciseness of Haskell. More necessary thinking and typing leads to more bugs, software engineering books talk about the number of bugs per 1000 lines of code being constant, independent of the level of the language. Take for instance the memory allocation in C: - you have to remember which macro you defined for the buffer size - check your input if it doesn't overflow your buffer - remember to free the memory at the right point(s) in your program - check that you don't use the pointer after the buffer has been freed The automatic memory allocation in Haskell doesn't just save you the typing for allocation and freeing, it saves a lot of thinking and checking. It prevents a lot of bugs and therefore, it saves testing and debugging time. Similar things can be said about other things that make Haskell programs more compact. There are other advantages when using Haskell, e.g. - better modularity, see the paper "Why functional programming matters"[0] - guaranteed pure functions make it easier to reason about the code. You can find more at the Haskell site[1]. Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl [0] http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf [1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Introduction#What.27s_good_about_functional_program... -- Folding@home What if you could share your unused computer power to help find a cure? In just 5 minutes you can join the world's biggest networked computer and get us closer sooner. Watch the video. http://folding.stanford.edu/