Jim Burton wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
On the one hand, it feels exciting to be around a programming language where there are deep theoretical discoveries and new design territories to be explored. (Compared to Haskell, the whole C / C++ / Java / JavaScript / Delphi / VisualBasic / Perl / Python thing seems so boring.)
On the other hand... WHAT THE HECK DOES ALL THAT TEXT *MEAN*?! >_<
I agree, it's exciting to use Haskell because of its theoretical underpinning and the sense of it as a lab for PL ideas.
The other downside is that you end up with a world where most of the "tools" are in fact one-man research projects or small toys. There are a few good, powerful, useful things out there. (GHC and Parsec immediately spring to mind.) But there's also a vast number of really tiny projects which don't seem to be terrifically well supported. Kind of makes me sad; Haskell seems almost doomed to be a language with fantastic potential, but little real-world traction.