[seanmcdirmid]

The point is that a scripting language is a "program to think" language, while haskell is often seen as a "think to program" language (at least when described as in the top level post). That you have to do more thinking and planning when using haskell (supposedly) doesn't help when the problem you are working on is not well understood and requires exploration (where you are forced to do exploration in your head...or on a whiteboard, rather than in code).

[mightybyte]

I strongly disagree. In Haskell the compiler helps me think a LOT more than other languages because it's checking more things for me. I don't have to explore things on the whiteboard, I can explore them in code and get very quick feedback about things I might have missed. I have built things in Haskell that I don't think I would have been able to build in other languages. The compiler is your friend, not your enemy. It's like having another developer there to bounce your ideas off of.

EDIT: Bottom line, I think Haskell also works well for people who "see programming as a cybernetic extension of their mind".

[seanmcdirmid]

I didn't make a claim, especially that claim. If haskell requires a lot of up front thinking, then it might turn off those who see programming as a cybernetic extension of their mind (using the computer to help you think, vs. thinking to use the computer). I do not know if the premise was true, but was made by the top level post.

[seanmcdirmid]

On your edit, I also didn't make that claim. All my premises are open.

[vilhelm_s]

I think part of it may be that it helps with thinking, but with a different kind of thinking than scripting languages?

There's that Perlis quote: "Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious". For me, a lot of thinking about programs involves thinking about the types of data involved, and there Haskell gives a language to talk about it. You can start writing down your datatypes, and the function types, directly in your emacs buffer (leaving the function bodies as just "undefined" at first). By contrast, if you are programming in some untyped language like Scheme, you have to do all that work inside comments---e.g. if you write a compiler you maybe start by writing a huge comment saying "this is the grammar I expect input expressions to follow". Having a type language around kind of helps by providing a notation.

I guess there is some other kind of exploratory thinking which untyped langauges provide a good notation for? But in my life I have mostly worked in typed languages, so I don't have any concrete idea of what it is.

[cousin_it]

The quote is from Fred Brooks (author of "The Mythical Man-Month"), and it goes like this:

> Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious.

I don't think it's about exploratory programming. It's more about reading other people's code.

[vilhelm_s]

Wow, I got that extremely wrong huh. Thanks for the correction.