Re: [Haskell-cafe] What *not* to use Haskell for

consalus:

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 2:38 AM, Dave Tapley wrote:

...

Hi everyone

So I should clarify I'm not a troll and do "see the Haskell light". But one thing I can never answer when preaching to others is "what does Haskell not do well?"

Usually I'll avoid then question and explain that it is a 'complete' language and we do have more than enough libraries to make it useful and productive. But I'd be keen to know if people have any anecdotes, ideally ones which can subsequently be twisted into an argument for Haskell ;)

Cheers,

Dave

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I think some would disagree with me, but I would advise against using haskell for a task that necessarily requires a lot of mutable state and IO and for which serious performance is a big factor. I'm not talking about stuff that can be approximated by zippers and whatnot, but rather situations where IORefs abound and data has identity. Haskell can quite capably do mutable state and IO, but if your task is all mutable state and IO, I'd lean toward a language that makes it easier (OCaml, perhaps).

Do you have an example of a mutable state/ IO bound application, like, hmm, a window manager or a revision control system or a file system...? -- Don