[MLton-user] 2006 ICFP Programming Contest

[jlouis@mongers.org]

At Mon, 03 Jul 2006 17:50:41 -0400,
Ray Racine wrote:

> The interesting observation was that there were a couple of fairly solid
> Scheme teams that year.  One (or both?) teams were 2 days into the
> contest and were still debugging their simulator.

I believe I was actually on one of the Scheme teams. Yes, we had a
hard time getting the simulator to work, I recall. When we got it to
work, it was awfully slow (scheme48 might be pretty, but it is not
fast).

> The reason why this all stuck around in my mind is because on that day I
> recall mulling over this experience in the context of the whole strong
> typing / dynamic typing debate.

My intuition, having used Scheme, Haskell and SML extensively, is that
static typing is definitely the way to go (for me). The functions that
are impossible to write in a statically typed (Hindley-Milner)
language are simply not worth having.

Also, I do not feel that the added expressibility of rank2-poly which
Haskell has is needed. Neither do I believe in monads for programming
anymore. The primary problem with my monad programming was that a
change in your monad-transformer stack will have you rewrite the whole
function. This is simply too irritating for adding a mere
exception. And since the world outside the pure Haskell bubble is
imperative and goes wrong, you quickly find yourself adding exception
transformers along function-call stacks -- to the point where it
begins to irritate you.