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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought of Haskell as a programming language for people who prefer maths to programming.

This characterisation of Haskell bugs me a lot, because most reputable mathematicians would have nothing to do with Haskell either. The mathematical parts of Haskell seem to attract logicians, not general mathematicians. General mathematiicians much prefer Sage or Mathematica.

Don't get me wrong, Haskell is a great language, but it's not very "mathematical". It just has terrible ambassadors that give the impression that category theory and Haskell are synonymous. They're not, Haskell has its own breed of categeory theory that I prefer to call Haskellory theory.

This is a reasonable introduction to Haskell that does away with that Haskegorical nonsense:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

>It just has terrible ambassadors that give the impression that category theory and Haskell are synonymous

It isn't ambassadors doing that, it is detractors.

>This is a reasonable introduction to Haskell that does away with that Haskegorical nonsense

Note that one of the authors, Don Stewart is almost certainly the biggest haskell ambassador in the history of the language. Which reinforces my other statement quite nicely.

> most reputable mathematicians would have nothing to do with Haskell either

Really? Is that because they don't like Haskell, or because they don't like programming in general?

A little bit of both, but just because Haskell is so weird and different for most people, including most mathematicians.

I think for the crowd you described, why not use Prolog? Prolog's idea is very much like what Math is to me (I only have a undergrad math degree, so don't count what I think is by any means absolutely correct)- here are some truth/axioms, can you deduce further theorems, and give result whether certain statements are true or false.

As far as I can tell, doing production work in Prolog would be an order of magnitude more difficult than doing production work in Haskell. This is just a guess, as I only have experience with the latter. This is similar to the reason we don't use Idris, Shen, and so on (yet!)

The problem with Prolog is that to get reasonably performant code at all you have to understand the underlying unification algorithm and manipulate it using cuts to limit backtracking. This means that you have to break the core abstractions of the language in order to do anything, which defeats the purpose of logic programming.

Functional programming in Haskell makes it fairly easy to write fast code, though Haskell in particular is tricky to reason about space-wise (due to laziness).

You might think of it that way, but it doesn't reflect reality at all.

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