hi all folks, i'm diving into haskell for more than one year now. the reason for that is just that i like haskell. (i'm a computer science student) but i consider to move back to c/c++. here are my thoughts. i've no specific question but i'd like to have your opinion. here we go: haskell is really nice : short phrased, declarative, math-feeling, the type system ensure low bug amount (i surely forget other nice things). but haskell is quite ugly in some way : * array : if i want to write something involving array, i could use list, and a lot (too much!) of array types (io/st, mutable/immutable, c-friendly (storable). worst, code involving one type can need to be rewritten for another type. * laziness / array (again) (i am biased since i have no knowledge of haskell profiling / performance seeking) always with array code, i was forced (maybe it's because i dont know enough) to use iouarray : if not, performance|memory consumption were low|high. but with iouarray, i cant use an array of MyType; i have to use an array of (say) float (it's ok if i have only float in MyType). that kind of thing is what i think is *really* low-level. in c, i can have an array of what-i-want. * randomIO side-effect is nicely resolved with monad. and you have to thread your state. if you're writing your monad or use a transformer, things are quite explicitly (even if it's implicit in the do notation) threaded. but the threading of the randomIO argument is really not explicit for me : it just means that the underlying/threaded state in the IO monad can encapsulated a lot of things. it feels exactly like a c function. but usually, you cant design a c-like function in haskell (i.e. a function with state). * more things i dont remember... * generally my general feeling for haskell vs c is: in haskell i always have to learn new things to get my work done ; although haskell is really easy to learn in the first step, it's becoming increasingly hard to get what's the *trick* to do what i want. e.g. writing myfunction x1 .. xn | x1 `seq` ... False = undefined is not declarative (and i still have to learn to identify where it helps and where it doesn't) the c language take some more time to learn at the beginning but that's it! what you can learn by after is better c programming. there are memory management, pointers, side-effects, but you can do what you want, it behaves as expected and you dont have to learn (in a academic paper) how to use an array or how to do io. :) please don't tell me "you're stupid, go back to your c and leave this glorious mailing list" did you had the same feeling ? does it disappear ? how ? thanks a lot, vo minh thu