
Haskell, Perl 6, Haskell - draegtun
http://comichunter.net/nowhere/opinions/perl6haskell.html
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stygianguest
This is actually one of the first really positive reactions to Perl 6 I've
seen so far. It seems quite nice indeed, but I have yet to really try it for
myself.

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jerf
From what I have seen, "Perl 6 is a more practical Haskell" is reasonably
fair, though elides a lot of things. And that is actually the most interesting
question in my mind; if Perl 5 is a Swiss Army Chainsaw, Perl 6 is a
multidimensional Swiss Army Meta-Chainsaw. I question whether there's really
that many people who can safely wield such a device. But I'm glad someone's
trying it, the answer is worth knowing.

And being the first language with arguably a more fungible grammar than Lisp
will be interesting too. So many wonderful things can be done with that....
and so many more so very, very terrible things. It will certainly be
interesting.

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aristidb
Haskell is probably a lot more stable and suitable for real-world use, i.e.
more practical, than Perl 6.

~~~
jerf
I'm talking about the still-hypothetical "usable public release" for both of
them. Despite the variance in calendar ages, both are really only now starting
to come to some level of practical usability, it seems to me.

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zby
Too bad it is blocked here at the London University by the clueless
FortiGuard. Anyone can confirm that it is not pornography?

~~~
dragonquest
Not porn. Its a static yellow HTML page with black text with the author
talking about his experiments with Perl 6, Haskell and the similarities
between them.

~~~
zby
Thanks - they updated the rating :)

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trezor
This is always one of my motivations for learning a new language.

In my field of business (development / .NET), there is no way C# is going away
as the language of choice, so learning new languages will very rarely allow me
to use those fully in the line of duty.

However, learning different languages, addressing problems differently,
allowing different kind of constructs with different levels of flexibility
often reveals other solutions to problems and allows you think about things
outside your normal day-to-day language's constraints.

Often the result of learning new languages is that I see concepts and
constructs which are neat and useful and which I like to the point that I will
backport it to C# if it can be done in a non-intrusive and not too cludgy way.

I expect this to yield true for many other programmers as well.

~~~
tl
You might be able to use F#. There is no technical reason you can't use F#
with C#, but I've seen political barriers to even using C# with VB.Net.

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mapleoin
There's always the issue of _who will maintain the code once you're gone?_.

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tl
That gets trotted out as the counter argument (even with vb .net vs c# where
the 2 languages are very similar), but it's moot. Code reuse doesn't happen
without clean interfaces (which reduces the problem of different languages)
because few programmers will read your code even if it's in the language they
want.

~~~
trezor
That code reuse doesn't happen is really a myth and where I work, things gets
reused a lot.

That said, what language to use boils down more to code-maintenance than code-
reuse since on .NET code reuse can (and will) happen transparently across CLR
languages.

I work for a software vendor and having high quality, maintainable code which
others can work with is a requirement for everything you do. Using some
"exotic" language would not be fully compliant with that requirement.

