On Nov 4, 2009, at 9:30 AM, Deniz Dogan wrote:
So what's the deal with Clean? Why is it preferable to Haskell? Why is it not?
(1) Speed. (2) If you are a Windows developer, the fact that Windows is the primary platform and others (even Mac OS, which is historically ironic) are second- (or in the case of Solaris) third-class citizens. (3) Did I mention speed? (4) It comes with its own IDE. I don't think it can do anything much that Haskell tools can't do, but if you don't like looking for things, it's a help. (5) Plus of course there's speed. (6) They're working on a Haskell front end, so you won't actually have to choose. (Anyone doing a Clean front end for Haskell?) (7) Haskell now has bang-patterns so you can specify (a bound on) intended strictness when you declare a function. But that's not in Haskell 98. (8) As a result of this, speed is a bit more "declarative" than adding $! in strange places. (9) There's a theorem prover for Clean, called Sparkle. Sadly, it's Windows-only, but we all know what most computers on the planet run, don't we? (It's probably Symbian, actually.) (10) And finally, of course, there's speed. Did I mention that?