Don Stewart
By the way, for those wondering why Jon Harrop would say such an unusual thing on the Haskell list, have a look at his contributions over on the OCaml list,
Well, to be perfectly honest: | > What are the advantages/disadvantages when comparing OCaml to Haskell? | | Techically, predictable performance, high performance on x64, tools like | camlp4 and language features including records, functors, polymorphic | variants and structurally-typed objects are probably the main advantages of | OCaml over Haskell. I think we can match language features with classes, concurrency, GADTs, STM, and so on. Predictable performance is a point, especially memory-wise. At least, I sometimes get surprises when a usage pattern causes too much or too little laziness. GHC uses a *lot* of memory in general, and in particular on 64 bits. I belive OCaml has a simpler semantics, and thus it is easier to optimize performance, especially for a beginner. Decent programmers get decent performance with Haskell, see e.g. the language shootout. | Non-technically, OCaml has more well-tested libraries, more practical books | (e.g. my own), more high-profile open source projects (e.g. FFTW has millions | of users) I'm not so sure about the library thing, it seems that Haskell has a bigger community, and while some libraries are less maintained than one would wish, some are pretty solid. Clearly, OCaml has been used in some serious settings, although I don't see why the number of users of one particular application should be significant to me. | There are far more practically-minded people in the OCaml community | and that is reflected in the much larger number of commercial | products that use OCaml. This almost reads as damning with faint praise. Do we have the educated, smart people, and a larger number of open source products? | Tangentially, OCaml has a successful relative in F# whereas | Haskell's close relatives are extinct. Or you could say that OCaml is one member of a family of languages, each slightly different, while Haskell managed to unify the ecosystem and community around a single standard. It would bear pointing out that just about every new, cool feature in emerging languages seem to come from Haskell. | nobody has ever done anything significant using Haskell He is entitled to his opinion of what is significant or not, just as I am entitled to my opinion of his opinion. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants