Don Stewart
Which I think really captures the joy of being able to write algebraic and data structure transformations, via rewrite rules, without having to extend the compiler -- all thanks to purity, laziness, and static typing.
This makes me wonder... Rewrite rules are certainly effective, and seem to be a good place to point (one of many, of course) when asked why you'd want a language with Haskell's characteristics. It seems like there should be an argument to this effect: 1. You'd like be able to declare compile-time transformations like map f . map g = map (f . g) without messing with the compiler 2. For x in [purity, laziness, static typing, higher-order functions] If you don't have x, here's what goes wrong (or can go wrong) 3. Of the very few languages with these characteristics, Haskell is the most widely-used, and the most actively developed and researched. Now, I don't know much about lisp, but aren't code transformations like this the whole point of macros? What makes is difficult to do the same thing in this context? What about object-oriented languages? The problem with step 1 in the argument is that it's already cast in a functional-programming framework. Is there a way to recast it so OOP could play? Thanks, Chad PS - the link now gives a "500 server error" - did our traffic overwhelm it? Is the cafe the next slashdot? ;)