On 5/16/12 3:57 PM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
Comparing languages is a highly non-trivial matter involving various disciplines (including various squidgy ones) and rarely makes sense without a very specific context for comparison.
Exactly. That's what I was trying to get at re the problems of comparing Haskell to C++ (or indeed any pair of dissimilar languages). A legitimate comparison will involve far more than microbenchmarks, but then a legitimate comparison must always have a specific focus and context in order to be able to say anything interesting. The problems I see in language comparisons is that by and large they tend not to have any such focus[1], and consequently they shed little light on how the languages compare and shed a bit of darkness by serving only to confirm initial biases. [1] A nice counter-example to this trend are papers like: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/modules-classes.pdf There was another one comparing the expressivity of Java-style polymorphism vs Haskell-style polymorphism, based on an analysis of in-the-wild code; but I can't seem to pull it up at the moment. -- Live well, ~wren