Haskell, Lisp, and verbosity [closed]

Question

For those of you experienced in both Haskell and some flavor of Lisp, I'm curious how "pleasant" (to use a horrid term) it is to write code in Haskell vs. Lisp.

Some background: I'm learning Haskell now, having earlier worked with Scheme and CL (and a little foray into Clojure). Traditionally, you could consider me a fan of dynamic languages for the succinctness and rapidity they provide. I quickly fell in love with Lisp macros, as it gave me yet another way to avoid verbosity and boilerplate.

I'm finding Haskell incredibly interesting, as it's introducing me to ways of coding I didn't know existed. It definitely has some aspects that seem like they would aid in achieving agility, like ease of writing partial functions. However, I'm a bit concerned about losing Lisp macros (I assume I lose them; truth be told I may have just not learned about them yet?) and the static typing system.

Would anyone who has done a decent amount of coding in both worlds mind commenting on how the experiences differ, which you prefer, and if said preference is situational?

Answer 1

There are really cool things that you can achieve in Lisp with macros that are cumbersome (if possible) in Haskell. Take for example the `memoize' macro (see Chapter 9 of Peter Norvig's PAIP). With it, you can define a function, say foo, and then simply evaluate (memoize 'foo), which replaces foo's global definition with a memoized version. Can you achieve the same effect in Haskell with higher-order functions?

Answer 2

First of all, don't worry about losing particular features like dynamic typing. As you're familiar with Common Lisp, a remarkably well-designed language, I assume you're aware that a language can't be reduced to its feature set. It's all about a coherent whole, isn't it?

In this regard, Haskell shines just as brightly as Common Lisp does. Its features combine to provide you with a way of programming that makes code extremely short and elegant. The lack of macros is mitigated somewhat by more elaborate (but, likewise, harder to understand and use) concepts like monads and arrows. The static type system adds to your power rather than getting in your way as it does in most object-oriented languages.

On the other hand, programming in Haskell is much less interactive than Lisp, and the tremendous amount of reflection present in languages like Lisp just doesn't fit the static view of the world that Haskell presupposes. The tool sets available to you are therefore quite different between the two languages, but hard to compare to one another.

I personally prefer the Lisp way of programming in general, as I feel it fits the way I work better. However, this doesn't mean you're bound to do so as well.