p>[...] die Problematik von NOSQL vs. SQL beleuchtet. Vor allem das Fazit sollte man sich zu Herzen nehmen.Best Haskell Papers of 2009: Eine zugegebenerma

Reference: Type Inference and Optimisation for an Impure World Ben Lippmeier PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Submitted June 2009. http://cs.anu.edu.au/people/Ben.Lippmeier/project/thesis/thesis-lippmeier-sub.pdf

“With the above criteria in mind, we looked at some of the more pop- ular free functional language implementations available. Our abil- ity to compare these was limited: we simply didn’t know enough about functional languages in general, and had no extensive experi- ence with any functional language implementation.”

I’ve tried to build multi-month small scale projects in Scala, OCaml and Haskell. My experience with Scala was that it was simply too verbose. I tried doing a web-app in Java, and found it maddeningly verbose. Scala was an improvement (compared to Java), but the Eclipse plugin wasn’t very mature and the syntax was still too verbose. I didn’t get too far with Scala because I felt that I was simply wasting too much time typing. If I were stuck on the JVM, it’d be a solid option, but then there’s Clojure.

OCaml was pretty powerful but ultimately too baroque. I spent nearly a year and a half trying to write a purely functional CAD program in it before giving up and using the OO component of the language. The OO system turned out to be clean, well thought out and aptly suited for conventional application programming, but no one wants to team up and write an staid old platform app these days.

Academic debates about type systems aside, Haskell’s typeclasses are more powerful than the ML system’s functors. Writing explicitly tail-recursive functions was also a pain. I think OCaml’s day may yet still come, if we’d be able to get it working on a mobile platform, because it’s (IMO) the best statically-typed hybrid functional/OO language out there.

My current preference right now is towards Haskell. The library support is fantastic, laziness is darn awful handy (space leaks be damned), and I can actually find other hackers doing stuff with the language (who helped me quite a bit when I was starting out). Sure, it took about a month to pick it up despite having done ML beforehand, but that’s a small price to pay for the joy of having a community, and of writing code with a plethora of pre-written toys (e.g. applicative functors, libraries for SMTP, the kitchen sink).

Would you do me a favor and fix the title to be “Semantic Editor Combinators”? (Note “combinator” rather than “combiner”.) The building blocks are combinators (higher-order functions, or more generally purely functional library elements) and more specifically lifters, but mainly not combiners of editors. I like to stem nomenclature confusions before they spread much.