aditya.siram:
Hi all, I would like to learn a little bit more about metaprogramming in Haskell. And I'm also wondering why metaprogramming is used much more in Ocaml than in Haskell.
Camlp4 (Ocaml's metaprogramming facility) doesn't seem to much more powerful that Template Haskell. The former is celebrated in its community as a killer feature of the language and its use is encouraged by numerous accessible tutorials. The latter however is down-played and not as well documented.
Seeing that the languages are parallel in many ways is there some reason for this? Is metaprogramming less useful in Haskell? Is it worth learning?
Template Haskell is actually a fairly popular extension (around 5% of Hackage packages use some TH). And the addition of quasiquotation -- which allows custom syntax -- might make it more popular. I think we don't see as much metaprogramming because of other language features -- laziness, operator syntax, and type classes -- make a bunch of common designs work without needing metaprogramming. -- Don