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Comment by Typhon | Hacker News Reader

If Haskell is the C++ of functional languages, what, in your opinion, is the C of functional languages ?

Except that Scala already is ;). Haskell pretty much sticks to functional programming and resisted adopting other paradigms (e.g. OO via O'Haskell). Scala, on the other hand seems to adopt as many paradigms as C++.

Scheme.

I want the Python of functional languages

Or Hy:

http://docs.hylang.org/en/latest/language/api.html

:-]

That would be Clojure.

Also Scheme. :-)

The C of statically typed functional languages is OCaml.

Which is more complicated and less expressive than haskell? That seems like a pretty bizarre choice.

When I used OCaml, I almost never used the object system. I didn't need it.

The "full" OCaml is pretty complicated, but most of the libraries don't force the "O" on you. (That said, if you're going to use OCaml, you should use the Jane Street libraries, which are far better than the standard library.)

>When I used OCaml, I almost never used the object system. I didn't need it.

Me neither, but it is still part of the language and adds a ton of complexity. Which makes the analogy of ocaml to C vs haskell to C++ quite poor.

>The "full" OCaml is pretty complicated

Precisely the point. The full C++ is pretty complicated too. The full haskell is far simpler than either.

>That said, if you're going to use OCaml, you should use the Jane Street libraries

They didn't exist when I used ocaml, and I would never go back to ocaml now.

What do you mean, less expressive?

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