[Oberon] Oberon Digest, Vol 140, Issue 4

[Lars O]

Søren Renner wrote:
>>

>> You've been sold a lie by the religious cult known as functional
>> programmers.
>
>
> "Lars O" is completely right. Disclaimer: I haven't actually learned
> Haskell. But he's right.
>

I have tried several times to learn Haskell, and a typical starting point
for me, since my main interest is parsing, is to find a Haskell programmer
somewhere on line that can tell you how to parse something char by char.
Go ahead try it... It's a joke. In GoLang, Oberon, FPC, plain C, PHP, it's
easy to parse char by char because you have iteration loops. In functional
Haskell your parser becomes an absolute joke because they are against
"state" and side effects... Go ahead look at the parser questions online
regarding haskell. Try to build a parser... it's easier in Lisp since Lisp
is a procedural language in many senses and you can escape the obnoxious
functional dogma when you have to.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually spent years programming in Haskell, I've
just tried to build real world things with Haskell as a learning projet
and I ran away quickly, not because haskell was hard, but because it
looked stupid when I tried to write basic things that everyone needs, like
a char by char parser.  Most haskell programmers don't write real world
code, they just write code and say "see look, no side effects!" ... "oops,
I wrote something to standard out, I had an evil side effect! what do I do
now...".