Better and better. Thanks in particular for the advice about Haskell's 
syntax being nicer than Ocaml's. Frankly the Ocaml syntax was a turn-off, 
but then, so was Python's whitespace at the start, which I now love.

In addition, multicore will become critical for computer music, of that I am 
sure, enabling more and more realistic physical modeling at a bare minimum.

Regards
Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Erik de Castro Lopo" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 5:25 PM
Subject: [Csnd] Re: Re: Anyone using Haskell?


> Michael Gogins wrote:
>
>> Well, thanks again. I'll look at your O'Caml blog entries again. At
>> various times I have looked at the language, but I have never actually
>> tried to write any code in it. Perhaps I will try.
>
> Quite honestly I'd say look at Haskell instead, for the following
> reasons:
>
>  - Haskell syntax is much nicer than Ocaml's.
>  - Haskell has type classes which are closer to Smalltalk objects
>    than anything else I can think of.
>  - Ocaml development is rather moribund, while Haskell's is very
>    very vibrant.
>  - The Ocaml community is good but a little quiet. Haskell's
>    community is incredibly active and vibrant.
>  - Haskell's functional purity means that it is better able to cope
>    with addressing the problems of multicore (> 8) programming [0].
>  - The vast majority of interesting CompSci research is done in
>    Haskell.
>
> Ocaml is still a great language, but the only things it has that
> Haskell doesn't is parameterized Modules (these are very powerful)
> and objects. However, almost noone uses Ocaml's object system and
> I would advise anyone looking at Ocaml to stay away from the object
> system until they are comfortable with the core of the langauge.
> They should also avoid imperative programming (ie references, for
> and while loops) to begin with as well. Since Ocaml has imperative
> and object oriented features its actually possible to write a subset
> of C in Ocaml and never really come to grips with the functional
> parts of the langauge.
>
> Erik
>
> [0] See Data Parallel Haskell. Its new and doesn't quite work
>    yet but show enormous promise.
>    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Data_Parallel_Haskell
>
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Erik de Castro Lopo
> http://www.mega-nerd.com/
>
>
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> csound"
> 

michael.gogins@gmail.com wrote:
> Better and better. Thanks in particular for the advice about Haskell's 
> syntax being nicer than Ocaml's. Frankly the Ocaml syntax was a 
> turn-off, but then, so was Python's whitespace at the start, which I now 
> love.
> 
> In addition, multicore will become critical for computer music, of that 
> I am sure, enabling more and more realistic physical modeling at a bare 
> minimum.
> 
It's good you love the whitespace, because Haskell uses that, too. 
Actually Haskell gives you the option of curly-braces/semicolons or 
meaningful whitespace, but most texts and tutorials seem to favor 
whitespace.

-Mike