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Why Lazy Functional Programming Languages Rule

Da Massive writes "Techworld has an in-depth chat with Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell and his philosophy of do one thing, and do it well. Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevance in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters. 'I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt.'"

4 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. Mmmm, Kay. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hascal, and other functional languages may be good for multi-core development. However not to many programmers program in them... Plus I find they do not scale well for larger application. Its good for true computing problem solving. But today most developopment is for larger application which doesn't necessarly solve problems per-say but create a tool that people can use.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Mmmm, Kay. by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Informative

      Absolutely, and this is why there's one of freenode's biggest IRC channels, a pair of mailing lists with thousands of subscribers, and the Hackage library/tool repository just waiting to help you solve your real world problem. Be it Compiler building, version control, writing interpretters for popular imperrative languages, Writing 3D shooters, or a whole host of other tasks.

  2. Re:Why they don't rule: by Bob-taro · · Score: 5, Informative

    The picture in the linked article is missing a beard.

    I was going to mod you funny, then I thought maybe a lot of people wouldn't get the beard reference, so I decided to post instead. Anyone else want to mod parent funny?

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    Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
  3. Re:Why "lazy"? by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're "lazy" because they don't do any work until necessary. For example, a function can return an infinitely long list, but only the elements you request will actually be calculated. Or, to compare them to Python, it's like having everything function like an iterator.

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    Ita erat quando hic adveni.