Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Jason Catena <jason.catena@gmail.com>]

Hailed Eris:
> One serious question today would be: what's LISP _really_ good for?

It's not LISP, but I've found Haskell good for writing terse code that
works.  Once you get your code past the type checker, it's likely to
just work for the forseeable future if it's pure.  Most tricky code
ends up pure, since the transforms are usually the more extensive,
interesting, and clever (ie difficult to debug) part of a (especially
pipeline-based) program.

I don't really care that a language is or is not close to the machine,
if the compiler (ie GHC) gets it in the same order of magnitude
runtime as C.  In fact, I'd rather manipulate lists with higher-order
functions, and just get the job done, than hack around with this
year's new idioms to make C all things to all people.  Best tool for
the job and all that: C has a great niche as an OS language, but
sometimes it's better just to write less, more stable code (eg xmonad
vs any C-based window manager).

Jason Catena