G'day all. Quoting Derek Elkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
The first goal listed in the Haskell 1.0 Report is: "It should be suitable for teaching, research, and applications, including building large systems." Haskell was never intended to be solely a teaching or research language. (You didn't necessarily say that, but it is a widely held and propagated misconception.)
I'd argue that you're kind of both right. The purpose of Haskell (i.e. "Haskell 89") was to unify all of those Miranda-like systems into a single language that everyone could share. However, arguably the biggest imperatives for Haskell 98 was to remove features that would confuse undergraduates. Even though we may not like to admit it, H98 really is primarily a teaching/research language. If we were doing H98 today, I don't think that would happen. The "research" part is bigger and better than ever, but we seem to weight "applications, including building large systems" more highly than "teaching" now. Having said that, in retrospect, the clean break was probably for the best. H98 gave us a simpler core on which to add the glasgow-exts. There's some stuff from Haskell 1.3 that I miss, and I hope it will come back, but there's also stuff that we're better off without. Cheers, Andrew Bromage _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
