On 21 May 2004 01:07, John Sharley wrote:
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?
What if anything does the quoted remark mean for the prospects of seeing a production Haskell compiler from Microsoft?
A response from the author of that page (Don Syme, also here at MSRC): On 21 May 2004 15:00, Don Syme wrote:
I've removed the offending line, since I didn't mean to be inflammatory. I believe it to be true - writing a GUI library wrapper for Win32 is fairly simple in C#, pretty hard in F#, and really quite researchy in Haskell - but others obviously don't agree.
Replaced with
Purely functional languages like Haskell are excellent within certain niches, but non-trivial problems exist with language interoperability between lazy and strict languages.
I believe that is uncontroversial. Forward this to the Haskell list if you like. Change should propagate to research.microsoft.com sometime soon.
Cheers
Don