Re: F#

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 19:31, Ashley Yakeley wrote:

In article <1085634303.3012.107.camel@JustTesting.cse.unsw.edu.au>, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

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On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 10:07, John Sharley wrote:

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I note this remark on the Microsoft Research site (http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ilx/fsharp.aspx) <quote> Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent within certain niches, but unfortunately some simple programming exercises can quickly turn into problems that require a PhD. to solve. </quote>

Are the Microsoft Research people working on GHC or anyone else on this list also of this opinion? If so, why?

This is a clear case of FUD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUD

I agree. It's been changed now, however:

"Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent within certain niches, but non-trivial problems exist with language interoperability between lazy and strict languages."

Given your work on FFI, would you care to comment? I wonder if F# really is as obviously preferable to a "Haskell#" as they claim?

It would help if they would detail what these supposedly non-trivial problems are. If you look at the FFI Addendum, you will see that Haskell's default evaluation strategy is barely mentioned at all in the document. This is, because - beyond the issues of evaluation order that the IO monad takes care of - laziness is nothing that interferes with the FFI. There is, however, a critical design decision involved: the Haskell FFI emphasises marshalling in Haskell land. Nevertheless, this design decision has been made due to good reasons beyond laziness; see the rationale at the beginning of Section 5 of the FFI Addendum for details. Generally, phrases such as "XYZ is excellent within certain niches" sounds like cheap propaganda to me. If you replace Haskell by Linux, I am sure you'll find similar statements on other Microsoft web pages ;-) Manuel