Re: [Haskell-cafe] What makes Haskell difficult as .NET?

dmehrtash:

In this presentation

http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?... 907

the speaker talks about F# on .Net platform. Early on in the talk he says that they did F# because haskell would be "hard to make as a .Net language". Does anyone know what features of Haskell make it difficult as .Net language?

The issue here I believe is primarily the desire to interoperate with any .NET library, with zero effort by the developer. Most .NET libraries are imperative, use mutable state -- so binding to those is less fun, and a bit more labor intensive, in Haskell -- though the FFI can certainly do it pretty easily. It also moves most of the .NET libraries into the IO monad, making them less useful. -- Don