Re: [Haskell-cafe] funct.prog. vs logic prog., practical Haskell

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 6:25 AM, Petr Pudlak wrote: Hi all,

I'd like to convince people at our university to pay more attention to functional languages, especially Haskell. Their arguments were that

(1) Functional programming is more academic than practical. (2) They are using logic programming already (Prolog); why is Haskell better than Prolog (or generally a functional language better than a logic programming language)?

Why can't a language be both? Get them to take a look at Mercury, which is *both* a logic programming language *and* a (strict) functional programming language, with Haskell-style type-classes and Clean-style uniqueness types. Mercury has been described as "Prolog for serious software engineers".