I find it odd when people talk about portability in languages. Form me that has always been a given (I started my first language, c++ in 2002). <br><br>I got into Haskell and FP in general when I took advanced languages at my uni and I still write haskell java and c++ regularly.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/29/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Kirkman</b> <<a href="mailto:dkirkman@gmail.com">dkirkman@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov <<a href="mailto:deliverable@gmail.com">deliverable@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> How do people stumble on Haskell? I've taught ML at UPenn, and many<br><br>For some diversity ...<br>
<br>For years I'd been using (and largely happy with)<br>pure fortran with a little tcl thrown in for scripting.<br>I'd played around with a few other languages for kicks<br>(Java, Lisp, c++), but never really found anything
<br>to pull me away from fortran for good: it's easy,<br>insanely portable, and code I wrote in 1988 still works<br>without modification.<br><br>About 2 years ago I ran into a stability problem<br>while taking numeric derivatives. In a moment of
<br>inspired procrastination, instead of properly fixing<br>the problem I decided that I needed 'automatic<br>differentiation'.<br><br>Google.<br>A series of fantastic papers by Jerzy Karczmarczuk.<br>Wow.<br>Google.
<br>GHC.<br>Can't get it installed on my mac laptop.<br>Stop.<br><br>Months pass. (probably more like a year) In a later<br>moment of procrastination, I find John Hughes' "Why<br>functional programming matters". After seeing Romberg
<br>integration implemented in a handful of lines, I was<br>hooked. But the real kicker was the performance of<br>GHC -- after getting it installed I benchmarked the<br>Hughes's code against a Fortran integrator. I don't
<br>remember the exact numbers, but the execution times<br>were within a factor of a few of each other (I was<br>expecting 2-3 orders of magnitude).<br><br>While I'm not yet entirely sold on the practicality<br>of the language (things move very fast, and it seems
<br>to be very difficult for me to stick with haskell98),<br>it's just too much fun to not use. I'm now using it<br>daily in a scripting role and one-offs, and I'm seriously<br>considering using it over fortran in a new workstation
<br>analysis code. (Actually, the 'fun' aspect of it is<br>providing a just a *bit* of motivation ...)<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>-david k.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Haskell-Cafe mailing list
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