[Icfp04-discuss] languages

[Michael Radziej]

Hi,

I found it pretty interesting what languages got used. For my part, I
use python a lot; I like it's clean syntax and rich libraries, which
simply support my daily work very good.

I tried to dig into the source of dunkosmiloolump (what a name!), only
to be thrown back when Monads where mentioned, so I'm currently digging
more into Haskell. It looks quite beautiful, and it's really completely
different. I had a look into ml years and years ago, and it's pretty interesting
how it evolves. I always like to learn new concepts. Though, are there
also things for parsing emails, rpc/xml libraries, and stuff like that?

What currently strikes my eye is that there seem to be strong influences
from Haskell (and predecessors) to Python. There's the list comprehension,
and (I'm not sure yet), Python's iterator concept seems conceptually close 
to Monads. Now that I've started following it, there's a whole library
("itertools") whose documentation starts:

  "This module implements a number of iterator building blocks inspired by
  constructs from the Haskell and SML programming languages. Each has been
  recast in a form suitable for Python."

This has been my first icfp, it's been a lot of fun and gives me new interesting
things to play with. Thanks to you all for all these weird ideas!

Michael