[Openmcl-devel] Speed, compilers and multi-core processors

[mikel evins]

On May 21, 2009, at 2:38 PM, Dan Weinreb wrote:

>
>
> Justin Grant wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for the responses Dan, Mikel :
>>>
>>> Haskell has many mutable data structures too
>> It does?  I didn't know that; I thought it didn't.  (I'm only up
>> to chapter 9 in "Real World Haskell".)
>>
>> You're ahead of me in RWH but what a great read hey ?
> Yes!  If anyone wants to learn Haskell, I strongly
> recommend this book.

I guess I should say that there are some valid criticisms of it, in  
that in several places it glosses over some details about its examples  
where you'd really like them to explain more. "real world" and  
"practical" treatments of programming topics have to strike the right  
balance between giving enough information to make sense of the  
examples, and being parsimonious enough that the reader's eyes don't  
glaze over, and the book doesn't break the table you lay it on. RWH  
maybe errs on the side of parsimony.

That said, it's still good. Two other introductions I'd recommend are  
"Learn You A Haskell For Great Good!"

   http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters


and "Haskell For C Programmers":

   http://www.haskell.org/~pairwise/intro/intro.html

>>
>> For all my playing devil's advocate regarding Clojure I really do  
>> appreciate all the work that's gone into it.
>> It's one of the best Lisp's on the JVM to date.
> Has anyone here tried out ABCL (Armed Bear Common Lisp)?  It runs
> on the JVM and is supposed to be Common Lisp.


I used it a good bit a couple of years ago. It's not bad, but at the  
time I ended up switching to Scala after a while, despite liking Lisp  
better, because it was just easier to get god results with Scala. I  
think it's easier to get good results with Clojure than with Scala,  
and more fun, too.

More Joy is Good.

--me