I’ve learned several languages, but now I want to choose one. The language that I most liked was Haskell, which is like an interpreted language but is a compiled.
What are the pros and cons of Haskell?
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I’ve learned several languages, but now I want to choose one. The language that I most liked was Haskell, which is like an interpreted language but is a compiled.
What are the pros and cons of Haskell?
Just a couple of ideas I’ve got in my head at the moment.
Pros
Learning Haskell will change the way you think about programming. (People often find themselves writing Haskell-like code in other languages once they learn Haskell.)
Type safety is miles above mainstream languages (null pointer exceptions, anyone?)
Type inference means you don’t have to worry about types, unless absolutely necessary.
It produces high performant executables.
Parallelism is almost trivial with the
parandpseqcombinatorsThe interactive environment (hugs/ghci) allow you to prototype ideas quickly
Has a nice supportive community (IRC, mailing lists, etc.)
Very expressive and concise syntax
GHC is actively being developed and improved, including support for code execution on GPU for that extra kick of high-performance computing
QuickCheck > unit testing
Cons
Learning Haskell will ruin all other languages for you.
It’s quite complicated to get into
Very easy to write cryptic programs that no-one understands, not even yourself a few days later