"bearophile" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Caligo: > >> Haskell is one of the most beautiful languages. I wish I had discovered >> it sooner. > > I am now able to write small Haskell programs. It has some features and > parts that I like significantly (and I'd like some of them in D too!), but > so far I am not appreciating it much on the whole. It feels almost like a > "puzzle language", as Forth (almost, but not really). Those operators are > not easy to find in the documentation, the purpose of all those little > functions is not easy to remember, and its obsession with purity sometimes > turns easy things into very complex things (I like purity and > immutability, but not much inside functions, so I prefer D). It's good for > some kinds of tasks (Euler Puzzles, certain math tasks, certain > experiments about types), acceptable for other tasks (some generic > algorithms, some string processing, etc), and bad for many other purposes, > so it doesn't feel like a general purpose language. I am sometimes able to > write very short programs with it, but often they are slow. It's not easy > for me to tell how much efficient a program will be, once compiled with > GHC. Keep in mind that I am a newbie of Haskell, so don't take my comments > too much seriously :-) >
Totally agree (and I like your comparion to Forth and the description "puzzle language"). Haskell is what proved to me that functional programming should be a feature of an imperative language, but not the fundamental nature of a language. (FWIW, Smalltalk (and to a much lesser extent, Java) proved the same to me about OO...and LISP with lists...JS with minimalism...ok, I'll stop now...Basically I just don't like pure/"beautiful" languages. They're pretty, but not practical.)
