On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Brian Boutel wrote:
they do the job better that the proprietary competition. Why then has Haskell not done as well as sendmail or apache? Perhaps because the battleground is different. To get people to adopt Haskell (or any other
brian
IMO, what's also important, is an infamous memory consumption. Everybody seems to ignore it, but by now I wouldn't use Haskell in a commercial product, because of this little inconvenience. For me, it doesn't matter much if a language is slow - as far as it's not very slow, it's ok. More important for me is the predictability. I have to know how much memory my program will eat. And in Haskell, with ghc the only sure answer is: "Very much". Things are better with nhc, true, though I haven't tried yet to use its impressive profiling tools. Hbc isn't alive, so there's no point in speaking about it. The other thing, which somebody has mentioned, is a steep learning curve. Most of us has understood and embraced the monads - in fact, I consider do notation as one of the more important things in Haskell. Yet it took me some time to understand it - and when I tried, I was a CS student. IMVHO monads are a difficult concept to grasp. And simple writing to the screen or reading text from keyboard enforces us to use IO. I don't know what to do to make them easier to understand. Perhaps these new papers make it better. The lack of standard arrays, with update in O(1) time, and hashtables is another thing. Every time I write a larger program, I use lists - with an unpleasant feeling that my favourite language forces me to use either nonstandard extensions or uneffective solutions. I think that IO arrays/hashtables should be in standard. Because they are in IO - they could work efficiently. Yes, I know about MArray/IArray. Yet I couldn't find information in sources about complexity of array operations. And they aren't Haskell 98 compliant. I'm also curious about what you think about the purpose of Haskell. I personally consider it *the* language to write compilers. But what can you do in it besided, that wouldn't be as easy in other languages? (I'm talking about large projects, we all know about polymorphism, higher-order function, etc.) Wojciech Moczydlowski, Jr