Again, i missed to forward the message to the list: I experince also the drug effect. Evolutionary psychologists would say that, because it was vital for our survival, since the stone age, we appreciate any tool powerful enough to solve many problems while at the same time remain simple. So whenever the utility versus learning.-using-,maintaining costs of a tool is low. then the tool is more appreciated and more pleasure we experiencie by using it. That applies either to a sword, a horse, a car or a programming language. Haskell has an execution strategy and a type system that cares for himself about code consistency and a reasonable optimization, It has only a few keywords, and a intuitive syntax , But combining the security that gives the first two factors and the flexibility of the other two, one can reach high levels of abstraction maintaining a high degree of confidence in the generated code, And such code can be applied to a wider variety of problems. For that matter I think that while other languages can borrow some features of haskell, they will never have the power that can be achieved by having them all. And most of them are deep in the core. 2009/9/30 Peter Verswyvelen Yep, LINQ makes C# more enjoyable :-) Scala and haXe also look nice, a bit

of a mix between OCaml/F#, C#/Java and Haskell. Besides the fact that hacking in Haskell is a great deal of fun, the main reason I see for learning Haskell: it makes you a better programmer. After a couple of years of playing with Haskell, I can now solve problems that I couldn't before. It's of course hard to tell if Haskell is the reason here, or just experience, but I feel it really is Haskell (actually, functional programming). Haskell made me see the world in a different way (and if I see Oleg's and co's code, I still have an infinitely long road ahead.

The main reason why you should not learn Haskell: it's a bit of a drug; after you learned Haskell, programming in an "industrial strength" language suddenly feels like a waste of time, time better spent learning more Haskell...

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Deniz Dogan wrote:

...

2009/9/30 Andrew Coppin :

...

(Mr C++ argues that homo sapiens fundamentally think in an imperative way, and therefore functional programming in general will never be popular.

Sounds more like Mr C++ fundamentally thinks in an imperative way because that's what he is used to.

I recently started working with C# and struggled for way too long with for/foreach loops to do things that in Haskell could be expressed using only folding, mapping and filtering. When I realised that those ideas actually exist in System.Linq I suddenly started liking the language a bit more.

txtCommaSeparatedNames.Text.Split(',').Select(x => x.Trim()).Where(x => x.Length > 0).Select(x => Convert.ToInt32(x)).ToList();

Ah, the joy of FP.

-- Deniz Dogan _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

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