-- i think that this may be interesting for other haskellers Hello Wolfgang, Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 8:24:09 PM, you wrote:
so, the concurrent programming, may be, the only area at now, where real-world, commercial programmers should prefer Haskell over all other languages.
are you a real-world, commercial programmer? If yes, I'd like to know the
yes
reason(s) for you programming in Haskell. Was it Haskell's support of concurrency? Just interested…
1. i don't write commercial apps with Haskell. although it's not entirely impossible. i've written in cafe (search for subject "Haskell's market") that i think about this now 2. programming languages is my hobby. in my feeling the main problem with C++ and Delphi (i don't used Java/C#) is that working with complex datatypes is not simple and straightforward, another problem is lack of support for anonymous code blocks (closures). even Perl beats them in these areas! Haskell attracted me due to the great type system, great closures support, type inferencing, good syntax. Having the full power of functional language to write most complex parts of code (i mean they require most complex algorithms) is very helpful. at the same time, for 80% of program speed is not matter, and FP/laziness again helps here, allowing just to write faster these parts of program. in addition, Haskell is very strong-typed language what allows to catch much more errors at compile time. these all results in what i wrote in less than one year program that is close in functionality to that others wrote in C++ during several years. this program required to write several general purpose libs and bindings to C libs, so i enlarged HCAR's hall of fame with some new entries :) about Concurrency - i was amazed how easy to use it. my first experience in this area was carrying out part of algorithm to another thread and it was implemented with just about 30-40 lines of code! i then enclosed this technique in the module that allows to use threads as message-processing systems - each has an "stdin", "stdout" and so on and there are functions that can create networks of arbitrary complexity from individual threads. again, the Haskell's type system greatly helps me here, allowing to pass between threads structured values of arbitrary types instead of just bytes - i can't imagine whether i will have enough patience to express in another language requirement that "stdout" of each thread should produce values of exact the same type as accepted by "stdin" of next thread in the pipe/network. again, Haskell saves lives :) - i mean that its powerful type system and type inferencing allowed to write type-safe code in the area where any other language would fail. -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com