Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)

Post by galaxyLogic » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #42

galaxyLogic wrote: post #30

Laziness is "cool", but is it really needed? I don't know any other commonly known languages that have that as a feature. Is it needed in general, or is it needed in Haskell in particular? Same thing seems to apply to monads. Haskell programmers use them a lot but other languages seem to work just fine without them. So my guess is that many of the special features of Haskell are solutions to problems you will have if…

The common argument goes that "laziness is not the best choice for all problems, but defaulting to it forces you to make some hard decisions (referential transparency, immutability, controlled effects, control structures as first-class citizens) that are beneficial for a large class of problems." In other words, you don't necessarily want laziness for its own sake (though sometimes you do) but you do want it for its…

Post by nequo » Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #30

Laziness is "cool", but is it really needed? I don't know any other commonly known languages that have that as a feature. Is it needed in general, or is it needed in Haskell in particular? Same thing seems to apply to monads. Haskell programmers use them a lot but other languages seem to work just fine without them. So my guess is that many of the special features of Haskell are solutions to problems you will have if…