Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re[2]: [Haskell] Haskell alternatives: functional programming in rich IDEs

On 12/15/06, Bulat Ziganshin  wrote:
> Hello Martin,
>
> Friday, December 15, 2006, 3:51:24 PM, you wrote:
>
> >>1) F#, is Ocaml dialect integrated in .NET environment
> >>2) Clean, very Haskell-like language with a commercial IDE, GUI libs and so on
> >>3) Business Objects, integration of Haskell-like language into Java
> > 4) Scala, which has a nice eclipse plugin, and I believe there's a
> > plugin for netbeans as well.
>
> is Scala FP language or imperative/OOP language with FP extensions like C#,
> for example?
>
> in other words, how it looks compared to F#, at least?

Scala could be completely functional if that's what you want.  It has
HOFs, pattern matching, you can make a lazy module (like in Ocaml) and
it has a variable type which cannot be mutated.  It even has some
variation of H-M type inference in the type checker.  But at the same
time, Scala is also imperative and fully OO (even primitive types like
int are objects).  Scala also falls into the concurrent paradigm by
taking a lot of ideas from Erlang and making them part of the
language.  I would say Scala is far from perfect, but I'd rather use
Scala than Java/C#, although I would personally be much more at home
and productive with Haskell.  Compared to F# (or Ocaml), neither of
which I have used much, I would say that Scala is more "modern" and
also has a better object system.  The drawback is that the current
release of Scala only runs on the JVM but a port to .NET is in
progress.

If you would like to see a bit of Scala code in a "real" program, I
recently wrote a program in Scala for a class and it is available
here:
http://codersbase.com/index.php/DarcsSim

I found the Eclipse support for Scala to be frustrating.  Many things
that I expected to work did not, but syntax coloring and indentation
worked fine.  Eclipse kept crashing on me and eventually corrupted
itself and instead of hassling with the reinstall of Eclipse I just
used emacs and I was much happier :)  The installer for OSX is also
not as polished or smooth as it should be.

Jason