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bos | 8 years ago

Let me put Mike's comment into what I think is its proper context. "Poor support for numerical computing" really means "relative to Mike's dream, which is not actually realisable by any programming language today" :-)

Most readers seem to be misinterpreting Mike as anchoring off other popular programming languages of today, whereas he's looking for language features for which there's (a) no consensus that they'll actually be good when they exist, and (b) don't yet exist. (I'm highly skeptical of dependently typed programming.)

I think that there's a case to be made that numeric programming in Haskell, relative to the state of the art of today rather than the year 2100, really isn't so great – but my concerns are very different than Mike's, and revolve around libraries rather than type system features.

Source: have done a bit of Haskell in my day.

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jackpirate|8 years ago

You're 95% correct about my view.

I do think that matlab/python are a bit better numerical programming languages than Haskell as-is, but only marginally. This is not just due to the library ecosystem, but also because I think that dynamic languages really are better than the best Haskell2010/GHC8.2 library theoretically possible. There are just some things that the existing type system makes a bit more awkward.