On 7/10/07, Sebastian Sylvan
While I personally think that the productivity argument should be enough to "make the switch", the killer-app (the app that will kill C, that is :-)) is concurrency. C is just not a tractable tool to program highly concurrent programs, unless the problem happens to be highly amenable to concurrency (web servers etc.). We need *something* else. It may not be Haskell, but it will be something (and it will probably be closer to Haskell than C!).
Yeah I agree with this. C# totally rocks, but threading is an unsolved problem. If you can get to the stage where you can get a non-optimized, readable/maintainable Haskell program to run at more than say 30% of the speed of a non-optimized, readable/maintainable C# program, but automatically runs across 16 or 256 cores, then you're on to a winner.