Don Stewart wrote:
I don't understand what's ugly about:
go s l x | x > m = s / fromIntegral l | otherwise = go (s+x) (l+1) (x+1)
And the point is that it is *reliable*. If you make your money day in, day out writing Haskell, and you don't want to rely on radical transformations for correctness, this is a sensible idiom to follow.
Nothing beats understanding what you're writing at all levels of abstraction.
What sets Haskell apart from every other programming language ever used in mainstream programming? You might say conciseness, or the ability to use lazy evaluation to structure your code in usual ways, or something like that. I would say what sets Haskell apart is "abstraction". There are other things, but this is the big one. Haskell allows you to abstract almost everything. The result is often highly succinct yet very readable programs. It would seem a terribly shame if you always have to throw away Haskell's key advantage to get decent runtime performance. If you're trying to get a real program to work, right now, then yes, you may have no choice. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for ways to keep code high-level yet performant. [I'm curios about your other comment. Does anybody, anywhere in the world, actually make *money* using Haskell? This seems rather unlikely to me...]