Re: Haskell: functional languages vs Lisp

From: Rainer Joswig (joswig_at_lispmachine.de)
Date: 05/29/04 

Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 09:48:00 +0200

In article <IQNtc.5275$_y7.3890@newssvr27.news.prodigy.com>,
 mikel <mikel@evins.net> wrote:

> 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.

There are a lot of approaches to delivery.

Some people just don't want to rewrite the code in another
language (which can be tough ;-) ).

a) Delivery system like for example in LispWorks
b) Lisp->C compiler
c) Subset languages with delivery in static language.
   Like 'Stella' (http://www.isi.edu/isd/LOOM/Stella/index.html).

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