| > * Given that debugging is difficult in Haskell, do Haskell programmers to get in the habit of statically debugging their code? Is that really more "better" than dynamic debugging? Some type error messages in languages like Scala and Haskell can make static debugging quite painful. I'm not sure what you mean by "static debugging". You're going to get type error messages while you're trying to compile, but certainly not at runtime. GHC really does its best to make them as explicit as possible and often suggests the correct fix. > * Does Haskell's powerful type system bias it to well understood problems with meaningful types? I attended a WGFP meeting once, and it was amazing to hear people like SPJ talk about how they found elegant solutions to icky programming problems, but I thought that, given a dirtier language, you could just write a dirty solution and be done with it. Not really. It is really a general purpose language, and you find very good libraries to interact with less strongly typed systems (eg, JSON). > * Would Python's dynamic type system make it more suited to problems with dirtier less clear types when compared to Haskell? If you know both Haskell and Python, do you divide your potential programs into "Python programs" and "Haskell programs"? If anything it would be more a question of libraries. One thing you won't be able to get in Haskell though is something like an ORM, with lazy-loaded collections and stuff like that. I find myself missing SQLAlchemy. Persistent does not have the same flexibility, despite Esqueleto which looks nice. > * When one writes Haskell code, do they really not have to debug and test their code? No. The best type system does not help when you write the wrong values with the right type in your program, or get the logic of your program wrong. But the errors tend to be more interesting. Also, you have a very powerful system to test the pure parts of your code (QuickCheck). |