On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 15:43:38 -0400, "John D. Ramsdell" wrote:

My son's nickname is Rama, so let me adopt it. I am a functional programmer, even when I use languages such as C. Scheme facilitated my development into a functional programmer, however, I appreciate the benefits of pure function programming at times. Yet when I use Haskell, I hear reminders of my Scheme past cast in the music of Santana. The words I hear are set to "Eval Ways":

You've got to change your evil ways... Rama Before I stop respecting you. You've got to change... Rama And every word that I say, it's true. You use strange syntax and typing And offset rules You don't mutate locations You use strange do's This can't go on... Lord knows you got to change.

John

Haskell poetry? Here is my Scheme -> Haskell story; since you have written your story as a poem, I have written mine, in the style of Japanese court poetry, as a poem in reply: Ode from a Haskeller to a Schemer Recursion was my curse, 'Till mapping came to fame, Parens to tail-recurse, Fade, monads are to blame. Let, let*, or letrec? They were my bar and foo. Now, monads have my neck: What shall there be to do? Recurse or iterate? The processes, too late! To map, fold, or filter: That is the question, sir. In Scheme, I threw a fit: Eval: how to write it? In Haskell, no more wait: Reactive-animate! -- by Benjamin L. Russell, July 7, 2008 (Tokyo time)