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response 2 of 4:
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Sep 9 05:54 UTC 2010 |
I think it would be great --- comedic gold --- if someone would parody
the "Hansel" character from "Zoolander" in some sort of Haskell-
related skit. The scene where the DJ strikes up his "Hansel"
soundtrack when Owen Wilson is arriving at the funeral? I could
totally see a "Haskell" soundtrack....
But seriously. There's quite a bit of real-world work going on in
Haskell. We do some at Google, but I can't talk about the project
specifics. Jane Street Capital (http://www.janestreet.com/) is doing
some serious work in a couple of functional languages, including
Haskell and OCaml (but I think primarily the latter; check out issue 7
of The Monad.Reader for an article from them:
http://www.haskell.org/sitewiki/images/0/03/TMR-Issue7.pdf). The
Haskell project wiki has a list of projects; one of the more
interesting is Pugs, a Perl 6 interpreter written in Haskell. Check
out http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications and
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry. Facebook is
using Haskell to make automated updates to PHP pages.
Tim Sweeney gave a fascinating talk at POPL in 2006 on "the next
mainstream language," where he cites functional programming techniques
as being extremely appealing for reducing defect rates and increasing
productivity in, e.g., video game programming. If you can view
PowerPoint slides, check out the slides from the talk:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt
I think that one of the things about learning different programming
paradigms, such as functional and logic programming, is that you can
take some of the techniques that you learn and apply them to other
paradigms. If you're stuck in the C/C++ world, you can still learn
Lisp and Haskell and try and apply some of the techniques you learn to
your C and C++ code. You could also try prototyping solutions in,
e.g., Haskell and using those as tools to guide your C/C++ code.
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