I was curious about your opinions on some of the mathey functional languages out there, like Haskell or OCaml or F# or even something more elaborate like Idris or Agda. Do you feel like they should have a place in industry, or just high-level self-indulgence?
I took Erik Maijer's course on Haskell, and enjoyed it quite a bit, though I haven't written a line of Haskell. D makes available a number of functional language things, like transitive immutability, purity, and lambdas. Haskell went a bit too far with minimizing the syntax, as redundancy in syntax makes for better error diagnostics. Otherwise it's a nice language.
I attempted to write some code in OCaml, but failed miserably. My (short) programs would fail with incomprehensible (to me) error messages. Trying different syntaxes just produced other messages. Other than the OCaml book, which I had, I couldn't find any helpful information online. I gave up on OCaml. OCaml may actually be a great language if it had a better compiler and far better documentation.
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Hi Walter.
I was curious about your opinions on some of the mathey functional languages out there, like Haskell or OCaml or F# or even something more elaborate like Idris or Agda. Do you feel like they should have a place in industry, or just high-level self-indulgence?
I took Erik Maijer's course on Haskell, and enjoyed it quite a bit, though I haven't written a line of Haskell. D makes available a number of functional language things, like transitive immutability, purity, and lambdas. Haskell went a bit too far with minimizing the syntax, as redundancy in syntax makes for better error diagnostics. Otherwise it's a nice language.
I attempted to write some code in OCaml, but failed miserably. My (short) programs would fail with incomprehensible (to me) error messages. Trying different syntaxes just produced other messages. Other than the OCaml book, which I had, I couldn't find any helpful information online. I gave up on OCaml. OCaml may actually be a great language if it had a better compiler and far better documentation.
I know nothing about F#, Idris or Agda.