Should I learn Haskell or Lisp?
Lisp doesn’t have a clear syntax distinction
between code and data.
And then there are all the parenthesis.
XKCD made fun of all the parentheses in the
Lisp programming language, with the master
giving the student all of his father’s parentheses.
They were like a master giving a student an
ancient weapon.
Lisp has the advantage of having been around
forever.
It is over fifty years old.
Lisp is considered elegant by some of its
fan-boys.
Lisp has an advanced exception handling system.
It had to, since it goes back to the mainframe
era.
Lisp ends up with little functions scattered
throughout the code, making it harder to troubleshoot
if it doesn’t work.
It is easy to write the code quickly, but
it is hard to write Lisp code that runs fast.
But at least it is still in use.
Lisp is still used, and even used on mainframes
that aren’t always older than the programmers
working on them.
In contrast, Haskell is considered a “pure”
programming language.
Haskell may be pure functional programming,
but how many employers actually use it?
It’s mostly academic.
Used in colleges?
Or taught in history class?
Unless you are working on migrating old mainframe
code, it is not used much.
I’ve heard people say it forces them to
think functionally, improving even their object
oriented coding.
The object of learning a programming language
should be the value in the marketplace, directly
or indirectly.
So you wouldn’t even learn it to improve
your logical structuring of code?
I could take a class on logic in the philosophy
department and get more benefit than I would
learning a dead language.
Yeah.
If you want to learn a dead language, Latin
and Fortran are equally good choices, and
they’re both better conversation starters
with the older generation than Haskell.
