

Reasons to use Haskell as a Mathematician - Open-Juicer
http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/01/eleven-reasons-to-use-haskell-as.html

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beloch
I like mathematica for stream-of-consciousness type stuff. Personal notes
rather than something I'd publish. I can code up some functions, try a few
things, show the important results, and talk about it with typeset equations
all in the same printable page. Latex input would be nicer, but it's not
terrible once you learn some of the keyboard shortcuts.

Matlab seems an odd thing to ignore. It's pretty good for doing more
computationally intensive work. It's not fantastic, but it gets the job done
and has good plotting features. I generate a lot of publishable figures with
matlab.

I've done some simulations using Fortran, and it's surprisingly good for a
language it's age. It's been continually updated. Legacy features occasionally
bite you in the ass. C is for drivers. I use it in the lab only when forced
to.

So, what does Haskell offer? It looks nicer than C. Can I write drivers for
odd-ball devices in it? Probably. Then again, I'm often just modifying some
C-code from a vendor, so the choice is already made for me. Fortran is so well
entrenched that I'm still going to wind up using it if I ever want to run
something through some crazy hydrodynamics code somebody else already wrote.
If I want to do stream-of-consciousness type stuff I'll still be using
mathematica. How is it at plotting things? Probably not very good since it
wasn't worth mentioning.

Sounds like another language I'll learn if I'm forced to.

If you really want to make this physicist drool the single best thing you can
do is give me a development environment that combines rich plotting features
and Latex input for comments. NOBODY HAS DONE THIS!!! Put a pleasant to use
language under the hood and you might have a winner.

~~~
regularfry
> So, what does Haskell offer? It looks nicer than C. Can I write drivers for
> odd-ball devices in it? Probably. Then again, I'm often just modifying some
> C-code from a vendor, so the choice is already made for me. Fortran is so
> well entrenched that I'm still going to wind up using it if I ever want to
> run something through some crazy hydrodynamics code somebody else already
> wrote.

Actually, the FFI story in Haskell is pretty neat. In the past I've written
Haskell plugins which interface to a C api for commercial, closed-source
software which isn't a million miles from crazy hydrodynamics code. The idea
of walling off statefulness behind a well-defined FFI interface and going to
town on the functional side is _nice_. I certainly found it easier to make
progress with GHC than with OCaml.

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ubasu
It seems ironic that in an article on a programming language named after
Haskell Curry, it says:

 _...to take a function of two arguments, say f(.,.), and construct from it a
function of a single variable defined by f_x(y) = f(x,y). Computer scientists
call such a thing a closure..._

~~~
sharkbot
I wouldn't consider its use ironic. A curried function is generally
implemented using closures (i.e., a function that remembers the lexical
environment of its definition). It might be a slight abuse of terminology, but
not one that should give much pause.

------
szany
Has the Prelude been rewritten since?

If not, are there plans to do this soon?

~~~
troutwine
No, the Prelude has not been rewritten and there are no plans to do so. Which
axiomatic set should be the basis of a Mathematical Prelude? That's a rather
tough question to answer, being that there are many arbitrary but not quite
compatible answers. Instead, the focus has shifted to shrinking the Prelude,
at least in Haskell':

<http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/Prelude>

------
Open-Juicer
>(9) Haskell Eats Circular Definitions for Breakfast

It's __recursive __, not circular, definition. A circular definition never
ends while a recursive one does.

~~~
primodemus
I think sigpfe is talking about corecursive definitions, which can produce
infinite data structures: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corecursion>

------
rbanffy
Don't be silly. Haskell Curry _was_ a mathematician.

Oh... It seems I got the title wrong ;-)

