<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Achim Schneider <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:barsoap@web.de">barsoap@web.de</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
What kind of things, barring coding on Haskell-less platforms and<br>
library interfaces would you choose to do in C++?</blockquote><div><br>You're asking a crowd that is heavily biased towards Haskell, what they would use C++ for? You should expect many answers to be of the form, "Well, if Haskell doesn't work, I'll try generating C or C++ from Haskell." :)<br>
<br>Which means, people here often see other languages as target languages for code generators. Which is something I think is pretty cool. But, getting back to your question...<br><br>If I were considering writing something in C++ here are some of my considerations:<br>
1) Is the thing I'm writing known to be easy to solve in C++?<br>2) Will writing it in C++ instead of, say, Haskell give me access to a developer pool that is superior for the task?<br>3) Will dealing with the very few drawbacks of laziness, in particular lazy IO or space leaks from laziness, end up dominating the development effort?<br>
4) Is it a work related project?<br>5) Am I just making a prototype or executable specification?<br><br>I put (2) and (4) up there because I think it's important to consider who you'll be working with. I can't really get way with using Haskell much at my day job because I'm the only one there that wants to use it. The company has to deal with the code I create even if I move on. Also, programming is hard regardless of how cool your language is. So it always seems wise to work with the sharpest set of programmers that you can. Sometimes that means picking a particular language.<br>
<br>It's also important to think about the merits of the languages themselves, such as (1), (3) and (5) point out. If you're prototyping, Haskell is light years ahead of C++. Then again, optimizing C++ programs, while tedious and error prone, is understood by far more people than optimizing Haskell programs. Laziness can be unpredictable.<br>
<br>I like Haskell a lot and I'd bias all my answers to the above 5 towards it, but C++ is also a very cool language. It's just cool for very different reasons than Haskell is cool. <br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I'm asking 'cos I'm learning C++ and can't get the proper motivation to<br>
do any program I can think of in it: If I need abstraction, I'm<br>
thinking Haskell or Scheme, and if I'm thinking performance, C itself<br>
more than suffices. <br></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
<br>
Plus template programming makes me shudder because of its atrocities<br>
against clear and straightforward FP, but that's a different matter.</blockquote><div><br>Heh. Yeah, it can be ugly, but it's also very powerful. The template system is Turing complete as you may know. Boost and Loki are two good examples of some of the cool things you can do with C++ if you really work the template system. <br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Coming to think of it, a compiler from a clean syntax to C++ templates<br>
sounds like a fun project... which I'd do in Haskell.</blockquote><div><br>Ah yes, even you're thinking about code generators. It's a very common way to think in this community it would seem.<br><br>Jason<br>
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