51–60 of 91 posts
Why hasn't haskell become popular?
I guess you'd need to define what you mean by functional language. That term gets thrown around a lot, to the point of meaninglessness. If you mean referentially transparent then neither Scala nor F# are referentially transparent.
Why hasn't haskell become popular?
I think that it's self-reinforcing. Let's have an honest conversation. Haskell is a great programming language. It might be the best. It is not going to get more than a 20% market share in the programming community. It could get 1 percent, which is about 5 times what it has now (measured in available jobs) and 25 times what it had 5 years ago. It could get 5 percent. It might even get 15 percent. Much of our industry…
Why hasn't haskell become popular?
Very steep learning curve. Months to years to become good at it rather than the weeks to months of the Java/C# style enterprise languages. Needs a more "math like" mindset rather than a step-wise stateful mindset like typical imperative programming languages. If you're not good at abstract math you may never get comfortable with Haskell.
Jane Street is using OCAML. That or F# is my preferred choice. Having said that, the tricky part is sticking to pure FP and coordinating data structures. Not impossible, but it's a foreign area for many shops.
Do you know why Jane Street chose OCaml over Haskell? They have similar performance, right?
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I like Scala, but it's still got mutable state, for loops, and lots of other imperative trappings. It's got some functional features, but I don't consider it to be a functional language (IMHO). If Scala is functional, then so are Ruby, JavaScript, and a host of other languages with higher order functions and the ability to be immutable, so long as you make the effort to not mutate anything (though anything is immutab…
I'm not sure how familiar you are with scala if you are equating them in equal 'functional power' to Ruby and Javascript. Have you read Functional Programming in Scala? The fact that the language supports immutable records out of the box, type classes, monadic comprehension all make it much more pleasant to deal with the realities of immutable data. You can write immutable java, but the language doesn't make it easy…
Scala is getting big in the enterprise. This list http://www.quora.com/What-startups-or-tech-companies-are-usi... gives a small overview
Scala is not a functional programming language, it is OO first and foremost. It has better support for functional programming than Java 8, Python or Smalltalk. And that in itself is great.
That sounds like all the functional stuff Scala has, right? What's it missing? Also, since when does 'functional' mean 'algebraic types'? Aren't those completely different things? Are common LISP and Scheme 'not as functional as scala'?
If you consider Scala functional, I think it wins the popularity contest: used by startups and established companies (Linkedin, Twitter, Meetup, Verizon, Morgan Stanley, Autodesk, HuffPo, etc, etc...) and is not "we use it in a dark corner where nobody cares" and more like "betting the whole farm on it".
I would "bet the whole farm" on Haskell before Scala. That's not to make a dig at Scala. It's way better than Java. It's also really complicated, and the need for JVM compatibility is a big part of that. Then you have the compile speed issues, the problematic tool chain, and the fact that average Java programmers, given Scala, will create unmaintainable nightmares. I'd use Scala over Haskell when I wanted JVM interop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with scala if you are equating them in equal 'functional power' to Ruby and Javascript. Have you read Functional Programming in Scala? The fact that the language supports immutable records out of the box, type classes, monadic comprehension all make it much more pleasant to deal with the realities of immutable data. You can write immutable java, but the language doesn't make it easy…
What's Scala's superior alternative to builder patterns? You can have lots of final members in a constructor in Java, too..