On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 3:28 AM, Benjamin L.Russell
One question that has been coming up at the back of my mind for the past several weeks has been how difficult would it be to create a collaborative multi-user online virtual world application in Haskell.
It should be easier than in many other languages, but that's not saying much: for any big, sprawling application, its own intrinsic complexity will make building it difficult. You can of course have an effect on extrinsic difficulties through, among other things, a careful choice of implementation language. An ill defined problem is going to face many more non-obvious decisions than one that is tightly scoped. On such a project, the chances that you'll make decisions (probably many of them) that turn out to be both pivotal in their importance and detrimental in their effect are high. Haskell provides a certain amount of defence against some such decisions through its emphasis on purity, but again it's the fuzzy nature of the problem space that's likely to cause you the most headaches, not aspects that a language will help much with.