On Fri, 16 Sep 2005, Mark Carter wrote:
This is not a troll, honest, so please bear with me ...
I'm a C/C++/VBA programmer (although the former 2 are several years old for me), with a sprinkling of Python. Needless to say, I was looking to see if there were any better ways of doing things. I've given things like Ruby and Scheme a bit of peck, and failed to get particularly enthusiastic about them. Two very interesting choices, though, appear to be Lisp and Haskell. It struck me that Lisp was, perhaps, the Ultimate Programming Language, the One True Language to rule them all; except that I always kept abandoning it for one reason or another (fiddly installation, lack of libraries, compatability problems, cost, possible license issues, etc.). My current foray in Haskell seems encouraging. wxHaskell installed a breeze, and seems quite usable (even though I'm a raw n00b to the language, and admittedly haven't grokked the semantics, and all this cid:part1.01000702.09000407@yahoo.co.uk IO a -> IO () business). On the one hand, it seems kinda academic, but on the other, it looks like it wants to be practical, too.
Bearing this in mind, and hoping you can see where I'm coming from, I think my question is: shouldn't you guys be using Lisp?
As someone else that has been learning both Haskell and Lisp, I think you should really look at Haskell as a wonderful experiment. Essentially, while Lisp can do pretty much anything, it isn't perfect and shouldn't be the last word., I don't think we should be satisfied with a language just the way it is. Haskell is very, very different than most languages. It's *purely* functional and lazy evaluating. The latter is most interesting to me from the compiler writing aspect. When I have a little more free time and a little more experience I'd love to have a deeper look at ghc and understand how it works. In essence though, I think that Haskell is worth learning simply because it tries something different.