On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Gregory Collins
Doing OO-style programming in Haskell is difficult and unnatural, it's true (although technically speaking it is possible). That said, nobody's yet to present a convincing argument to me why Java gets a free pass for lacking closures and typeclasses.
I might be wrong, but doesn't Java's concepts of inner classes and interfaces together with adapter classes can be used to replace closures and typeclasses in a way? An inner class allows you to implicitly capture the parent object ("environment"), just like a closure does in a sense. Interfaces group together methods, like type classes do. Although I'm actually a C# fanboy for doing "industrial" programming, I think the Java designers did an excellent job, finding a good balance in language features, ease of use and readability, and although C# does offer closures and many more FP constructs, I really miss the above Java constructs.