
On 2008 May 18, at 9:55, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
Bulat is the naysayer of the group; according to him Haskell is a nice idea that will never actually work (but he uses it anyway, who knows how he rationalizes it to himself).
Bulat is apparently not alone in this belief. I seem to spend all my time on other forums dealing with people who have exactly the same opinion.
There's a difference. When I started (GHC 6.4.2 was current), Bulat was spending his mailing list time denying the possibility of what DPH does now, and claiming that what GHC 6.8.2 does now was unlikely. (Meanwhile, I can't say much for "oh, i didn't understand that code, but surely we should be able to do at least as good without performance hacks?" when the code you didn't understand is all performance hacks.... You really have no business trying to draw comparisons when you don't even know when you're comparing apples to aardvarks, let alone apples to oranges.) Optimization is hard. Don't like it? Become a compiler researcher and find better ways to do it. Note that C / procedural language optimization research has at least a 20-year head start on functional programming optimization, and that the problems are very different: the C world would love to be at the point where optimizing the C equivalent of "sum xs / length xs" is worth thinking about; they're still not really in a position to *detect* it unless the language is simple enough to make such reasoning relatively easy (e.g. FORTRAN). -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH