> the bottom line: it's just not that great for newbies. since most people are going to be newbies at it, i could not recommend it at all. sometimes i think the language even goes over my head, and I'm supposed to be a pretty smart cookie.
mmm.
> If i have to recommend something now it would be python. because it's easy and because i started using it for my personal stuff. i know lots of languages and that's what i end up coming back to if i need to do stuff quickly.
Python and Haskell are useful in completely different domains.
at the train station we have some Haskell application which does one thing: it does accounting of the number of free and parked bicycles in each rack. in this case a comparison with another programming language is useful.
my comment is necessarily about applications where a comparison is useful, not those specialized financial applications at investment banks where Haskell is popular for undoubtedly good reasons i have absolutely no clue about.
By 'different domains', I don't think he was implying specialized financial applications as the only good domain for Haskell.
Haskell is a very good general purpose programming language for the reasons the commenterd gave in the thread. It is great for all kinds of general backend tasks. The kind of tasks one would associate with Java would also be a great for for Haskell.
Python is also general purpose. It's dynamic typing is especially good in specialized domains of rapid prototyping and exploratory data analysis (perhaps useful at investment banks too).
mmm.
> If i have to recommend something now it would be python. because it's easy and because i started using it for my personal stuff. i know lots of languages and that's what i end up coming back to if i need to do stuff quickly.
Python and Haskell are useful in completely different domains.