Jerszy, Although I think Haskell is a beautiful language, Jelovic is right on his core points, Haskell implementations don't meet the needs of the working programmer. A user can download Python or Perl to his windows or linux computer, install, and very quickly be up and running writing code that calls system libraries, talks to mysql databases, retrieves XML content from the web and parses it, etc. Moreover, if the default libraries don't meet his/her needs, it is easy to find additional libraries on the web, and when found, there is a high likelyhood that they will work as advertised with the installed system. Contrast the above with Haskell, which doesn't immediately, easily and reliably install on all platforms (perhaps aside from Hugs), is still figuring out core language features,and does not even have a consistent set of libraries for simple stuff like filesystem access! There are, perhaps good reasons for all these failures, but please recognize them for what they are: failures to meet the needs of the working programmer who just wants to get something done (whether he/she lives in YU, FR, JP, or US) I would love to be using Haskell for day to day programming work but I can't at this time. Unless the community recognizes what is required and gets it done, I never will. -Alex- ___________________________________________________________________ S. Alexander Jacobson Shop.Com 1-646-638-2300 voice The Easiest Way To Shop (sm) On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
Fritz K Ruehr wrote:
...
The second link is a little polemic entitled "Why People Aren't Using Haskell", which I presume would be of interest to readers of this list (the author is Dejan Jelovic, whom I don't recognize as a regular contributor here):
http://www.jelovic.com/articles/why_people_arent_using_haskell.htm
If you didn't verify this site, forget it. There is NOTHING serious there.
Over and over again the same silly song, by a person who - visibly - had never anything to do with functional languages, who thinks now about hiring some C and java programmers living in Belgrade, but who writes such silly, incompetent things as:
And there is an air of staleness: where new versions of these other languages appear frequently, the Haskell community is offering you Hugs98.
Delovic points out that some languages became "immensely" popular, as e.g. Ruby, and that Haskell is marginal. Hm. this extremely orthodox Japanese essence of O-O programming may have some practical merits, especially those which come from shameless borrowing from Eiffel, Sather, Clu and Common Lisp, but calling Haskell "marginal" or "obscure" informs us not what is Haskell, but who is Jelovic. He accuses the Haskell community of not providing libraries...
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Perhaps there is *one* point worth mentioning: the necessity to publish papers about Haskell far from such journals as JFP or HOSC, but to try to reach DrDobbs etc. I would add: Software: Practice and experience, and journals on numerical software where one could show some non-trivial implementations of practical, numerical algorithms.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk Caen, France
PS. What is "hamster dance", anyway?
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