-----Original Message----- From: Benjamin L. Russell [mailto:russell@brainlink.com] Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 11:50 PM To: Doug Ransom; haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Re: Will Haskell be commercialized in the future?

On Fri, 24 Nov 2000 09:15:52 -0800 Doug Ransom wrote:

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A lot of the things Haskell excells at (IMO) inferior tools are being used in place. For example, microsoft has build good XSLT translators and two new compilers (C#, VB7) in the last couple years. Unfortunately, C#, not Haskell, will probably be "the" language for the next decade. [stuff deleted]

Just out of curiosity: what makes you so sure about C#? C# has some potential big problems, too: in particular, the ability to declare a portion of the code "unsafe," which can encourage unsafe programming among entrenched C/C++ programmers.

Well, first of all, most C++ programmers really hate C++ and will be happy to stay in safe mode and move to C#. There were cheers at the Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference when MS announced garbage collection for the COM replacement and the safety available with C# and managed C++ code. C# is a huge improvement over C++. Why would a C++ programmer want to go into unsafe mode? I guess when they are writing interfaces to device drives, operating system calls, and legacy interfaces.

I myself am in no big hurry to master C#. I'd rather use a set of domain-specific languages with interlinked code, rather than a single language that purports to be as general-purpose as C# does.

Well, I would prefer to master Haskell and use that as my general purpose language. Fat chance since the object models available in the microsoft common language runtime are designed for impertive programming.

Benjamin L. Russell russell@brainlink.com "Furuike ya! Kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." --Matsuo Basho