A while back we were talking about comparing programming languages for 
non-csound aspects of computer music (score generation, etc.) and the 
language Haskell came up.

I have spent about six months learning Haskell in my spare time. At first I 
thought it was the coolest thing imaginable. I was amazed to discover this 
community of really intelligent---and no less important, stylish---people 
who had made a beauty of a language.

Well, after trying to write some real code, I have decided it's not the 
right language for everything. For example, for writing my graphical score 
editor (a work in progress) I'm returning to Python. GUI stuff and anything 
that is best conceived as objects with state---that's the stuff that is 
difficult in Haskell. Or it's difficult until you know the right way, but 
it was taking too damn long to learn the right way. Haskell is a functional 
language and is very different from OO languages. It was really hard to 
understand, and even as I continued to learn, I always felt like everything 
was just too hard and complicated. There was always some wrinkle I hadn't 
learned yet. And not to mention that performance and space issues that come 
with a lazy language, and how complicated it is to deal with them. I was 
spending vast amounts of time wrestling with the downsides of the language 
and not really getting anything done. Haskell programs, the real-world ones 
that don't quite fit the functional paradigm, tend to have a tremendous 
amount of "visual noise"---like twice as many identifiers are needed and 
they are twice as long.

I do think Haskell might be the right language for doing backtracking 
search or optimization.

Mike


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