Re: Interesting essay

[Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@...>]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Martin Guy <martinwguy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
>
> Sadly, the essay's factual base is uninformed, throwing out bald statements like
> "teams of talented academics were needed to write Haskell" as if they were true.
>
> One man designed and wrote the language that Haskell is an
> all-but-exact copy of. They then wrapped it in libraries, someone
> designed a proper I/O mechanism for it and some "module" interface I
> think. Hardly anything requiring talent or academia.
> It's the open-source version of Miranda, with almost no changes other
> that wrapping it in libraries, adding a proper I/O mechanism (the
> incomprehensible "monads") and a handful of tiny syntactic changes
> like changing the line comment chars from || to -- and the modulo
> operator from "mod" to the inscrutable, if traditional, "%".

The original article is full of hyperbole, but "teams of academics" is
closer to the truth about Haskell than your version, see the "History
of Haskell" paper:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm

BTW, the first version of the Haskell spec did not have monads, but
had two different ways to do I/O, streams and continuations. The
module system also came later. Perhaps you are making confusion with
type classes, which were in the language from the start, and would be
the biggest deviation from Miranda. But I would hardly call type
classes as something "hardly requiring talent or academia". :-)

Sorry for the "somebody is wrong on the internet" off-topic message...

--
Fabio Mascarenhas