Re: Haskell: functional languages vs Lisp

From: mikel (mikel_at_evins.net)
Date: 05/28/04 

Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 21:05:44 GMT

Nelson Marcelino wrote:
> I am curious to know what advantages does Lisp have over Haskell.

It's been around a long time and its features reflect a lot of what
people need and want to do with a programming language. It's especially
easy to edit, and easy to make tools to support editing, refactoring,
and other code-construction tasks. It supports live updates of running
applications better than any other language or runtime except perhaps
Smalltalk. Also along with Smalltalk, it provides exceptional support
for catching and repairing errors and other deficiencies while an
application is running.

> I would like to know what people think of newer languages such as Lisp
> OCAML SML
> and how they compare to Lisp.

I like ML generally, and especially Ocaml, a lot. I use it almost as
much as I use Lisp. Basically, when I need to do something complicated
that must run very fast and is best delivered as a single,
self-contained command-line utility, I write it in Ocaml. For
interactive things (or long-running processes with interactive monitors)
I prefer to use Lisp.

It so happens that over the past few months I've conducted a sort of
informal experiment, using Common Lisp, Scheme, and Ocaml to write and
rewrite the same nontrivial application. The application is a
commmand-line code-groveling tools that has to process about 600MB of
data on each run and do a bunch of data-extraction and restructuring,
and write a report. It's for construction of part of a product that
customers pay a lot of money for, so it has to be reliable and good, but
I have a lot of freedom to build it any way I like (as long as it keeps
doing its job quickly and reliably). Without any particular agenda (I
tried all three languages because they're the ones I like most), I have
evolved a process that involves prototyping new features in Common Lisp
and then delivering them in Ocaml. I find it easier to explore the
problem space interactively in Lisp, and easier to deliver a program
whose source is concise, and whose executable is small, simple, and fast
in Ocaml. It's pretty easy to translate ideas from Lisp to Ocaml.

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