Why Not Haskell?
I've been spending time learning Haskell lately, as part of an investigation into tools which are amenable to static analysis at work.<p>To learn about the situation, I've put together similar programs in Lisp, OCaml, and Haskell, as well as installed compilers for Haskell & Ocaml on the PPC.<p>Well -<p>I've coded for over a decade, and I've never encountered such a difficult to use language and jargony community & documentation (including AWK & SED). The only reasons I have been able to do anything are Real World Haskell, Learn You A Haskell, and Stack Overflow.<p>I'm not going to say Haskell is useless, or has no libraries, etc.  Those aren't true. It's also not a bad language because it's weirder than my Blub (Common Lisp). It's a really sweet language, and I think in the hands of an expert, Haskell can <i>dance</i>.<p>But, I'm going to say Haskell is nearly impossible for an experienced procedural programmer to pick up and go with on the fly. There are a few reasons for my opinion:<p>* Special operators out the wazzoo. >>= ` ++ :: etc. The wrong 'dialect' of Haskell leads you to believe it's Perl and APL's love child. It's just not clear what something does until you find a reference book. Google doesn't help here - I don't even know the verbal names for some of them. :)<p>* Monads & in particular, the IO Monad. The number of tutorials and explanations (and the number of new ones) suggest that this is not the most obvious concept in the land. It seems to be very simple if you know what you're doing (and what operators to use), though.<p>* The REPL is not identical to the compiler. This means that you can't <i>trust</i> the REPL. Coming from Python and Lisp, that is a pain.<p>* Type messages that are quite unclear, and probably require referring to the Haskell98 report to fully understand.<p><i>Regardless</i>, the above are surmountable problems and reasonable when moving to a new paradigm (very frustrating, though).<p>However, there are two key issues that are close to deal-breakers, with a third more minor one.<p>* Time to put a small program together. Easily 3x-10x my time working on Ocaml, a language which I am less experienced in (in both languages, I am amazingly inexperienced).<p>* Building the compiler on PPC (business reasons why I would need to do this).  Ocaml builds with the traditional ./configure && make. Very straightforward. GHC requires a cross compile with some funky source tweaks, or <i>possibly</i> a binary package (but the bin package dependency tree required replacing libc++, at which point I stopped).  This is a dealbreaker unless I can straightforwardly guarantee my boss a good ROI with Haskell vs. (OCaml or other statically typed language).<p>* Human costs for my code. It's not professional to have a codebase only I can use in a team. Yes, the team could learn Haskell, but would it be a good ROI? If OCaml gets us there faster...<p>So Haskell is probably not going to work for me at work. :-(  We'll see though.