Trent Shipley wrote:
On Tuesday 2006-06-13 09:26, David Fetter wrote:
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:18:17AM -0600, Scott Ribe wrote:
To hold it up as any kind of paradigm is really misinformed.
SQL had something that relational algebra/relational calculus did not
have, which is that somebody without a math degree can stare at it a
short while and *do* something with it right away. That it also has
other properties that are extremely useful and powerful (the ability
to specify states of ignorance using NULL, do arithmetic, use
aggregates, etc.) is what has made it such a smashing success.
Now, there's another thing that makes it amazingly hard to displace:
imagining what would be better *enough* to justify the many millions
of people-years and even more billions of dollars needed to move away
from it. Despite Date's many whines over the decades, his
still-vaporware Relational Model doesn't even vaguely approximate that
criterion.
COBOL and VisualBasic are better than Haskell by the same argument.
Well, VisualBasic really sucks IMHO, but if I had to choose between
taking over a 100.000-line VB Project, or a 10.000 line Haskhell
Project, I'm not sure if I wouldn't choose the VB one.
Haskhell has very nice properties, but there are haskhell onelines
which I can stare at for hours, and am still not exactly sure what they
do ;-)
I normally prefer languages with a terse syntax, but haskhell is
sometimes too much even for me ;-)
greetings, Florian Pflug
