Scheme as a virtual machine?

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

namekuseijin <namekuseijin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13 out, 21:01, Ertugrul Söylemez <e... at ertes.de> wrote:
> > What exactly is "friggin' huge" and "complex" about Haskell, and
> > what's this stuff about a "very own monolithic gcc"?  Haskell isn't
> > a lot more complex than Scheme.  In fact, Python is much more
> > complex.  Reduced to bare metal (i.e. leaving out syntactic sugar)
> > Haskell is one of the simplest languages.
>
> yeah, like scheme, it's essentially evaluation of lambda expressions.
> Unlike scheme, it's got a huge plethora of syntatic sugar as big and
> complex as a full numeric tower.  Such is the fear to avoid
> parentheses at all costs that they allowed lots of perlisms into the
> language ($ . `` >>= etc) plus python's significant whitespace.  So,
> in practice, even though at the core it's as simple as scheme's core,
> at practice it's so mindnumbing complex that only one implementation
> is worth of note.

That's nonsense.  There is only little syntactic sugar in Haskell.  And
all of them make your life considerably easier.  You get multiple
function clauses instead of an explicit 'case', which makes your
functions much more readable.  You get 'do'-notation for monads, which
makes (many) monadic computations much easier to read.  And you get
support for infix functions with a very clean syntax.  That's about all
the syntactic features you use in general.

BTW, you mentioned symbols ('$', '.' and '>>='), which are not syntactic
sugar at all.  They are just normal functions, for which it makes sense
to be infix.  The fact that you sold them as syntactic sugar or
"perlisms" proves that you have no idea about the language, so stop
crying.  Also Python-style significant whitespace is strictly optional.
It's nice though.  After all most Haskell programmers prefer it.

Further Scheme lacks these:
* A powerful type system,
* lazy evaluation,
* non-strict semantics,
* easy, straightforward to use concurrency,
* easy, straightforward to use parallelism and
* much more.

I'm not saying Scheme is a bad language (I recommend it to beginners),
but it doesn't beat Haskell in any way, at least for me, and in contrast
to you I /can/ make a comparison, because I have used both productively.


> And one as complex and scary beast as gcc... that's the cost of a very
> irregular syntax...

What also proves that you have no idea is the fact that there is no
Haskell compiler called 'gcc'.  That's the GNU C compiler.  There is the
Glasgow Haskell Compiler, GHC, and it's by far not the only one.  It's
just the one most people use, and there is such a compiler for all
languages.  Many Schemers use Racket, for example.

You never used Haskell seriously, so stop complaining.


Greets,
Ertugrul


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