[awda]

Why Haskell?

[lbrandy]

Ah, my favorite question.

We previously had a custom DSL and it outgrew it's DSL-ness. The DSL was really good at one thing (implicit concurrency and scheduling io), and bad at everything else (cpu, memory, debugging, tooling). The predecessor was wildly successful and created new problems. Once all those secondary concerns became first order, we didn't want to start building all this ecosystem stuff for our homemade DSL. We needed to go from DSL to, ya know, an L. So the question is which...

If you understand the central idea of Haxl, I don't know of any other language that would let you do what Haxl in Haskell does. The built in language support for building DSLs (hijacking the operators including applicative/monadic operations) -really- shines in this case. I would -love- to see haxl-like implicit concurrency in other languages that feel as natural and concise. Consider that a challenge. I thought about trying to do it in C++ for edification/pedagogical purposes but it's an absolutely brutal mess of templates and hackery. There may be a better way, though.

[msie]

Did you have a problem with namespace collisions of identical field names in records? Is that much of a problem in Haskell? How did you deal with them? Thanks.

[hythloday]

I only skimmed the tutorial, but in Scala/Finagle:

  val (friendsX, friendsY) = (friendsOf(x), friendsOf(y))
  for {
    fx <- friendsX
    fy <- friendsY
  } yield (fx intersect fy).size

really liking the look of this, thanks for open-sourcing!

[lukasm]

How about Scala?