Re: [Haskell-cafe] Research language vs. professional language

Ryan Ingram:

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 7:27 PM, Jonathan Cast wrote:

...

This concept of `day-to-day work' is a curious one. Haskell is not a mature language, and probably shouldn't ever be one.

I see where you are coming from here, but I think that train has already started and can't be stopped. I find Haskell interesting as a professional programmer for these four reasons: it's pure, it's functional, it's lazy, and it's got a great compiler. [..]

...

There will always be new discoveries in purely functional programming, and as the art advances, features like this ad-hoc overloading hack (and ACIO) will become obsolete and have to be thrown over-board.

This is a good point. However, it seems to me that the pure programming language research is moving towards dependently typed languages, and that progress in Haskell has been more application-side; transactional memory and data-parallel, along with research on various fusion techniques, for example.

Let me quote from the Preface of the Haskell report:

It was decided that a committee should be formed to design such a language, providing faster communication of new ideas, a stable foundation for real applications development, and a vehicle through which others would be encouraged to use functional languages.

and

It should be suitable for teaching, research, and applications, including building large systems.

From the outset, the Haskell vision included being a "stable foundation for real applications development" (I read this as aiming at industrial use) and "research". This leads to tension, but, for better or worse, I believe that the Haskell community -in its current form- is pretty much committed to meet both goals. You can see it in GHC. It implements the static Haskell 98 and at the same time many experimental, researchy features (which you use at your own risk). More generally, I think that this is one of the killer features of functional languages, they provide a fast path from innovative, even highly theoretical research to practical applications. This may not work forever -maybe all interesting research that can be done in Haskell without radical changes will have been done at some point- but for the moment, I think we are in pretty good shape. Manuel