In simplistic terms, Clean seems to be a “better Haskell”.
Edit: I just downloaded the bundle tar, looked at some sources and found out that vim has syntax coloring for Clean out of the box. Vim never ceases to amaze me.
More Edit: Clean transpiles to C, which means that when you look at generated code, or just disassemble the resulting binary, you will probably be able to make sense of what you see. When I disassemble a Haskell binary, I can't make heads or tails of it.
As I tried both Clean and Haskell, for me Clean is "worse Haskell".
As one example, Clean did not support non-latin1 alphabets in the UI library and my attempt to somehow correct the situation was in vain, the next release of the language did contain the same error. In contrast, when I discovered non-linear (at least quadratic) behavior in relatively fringe case of type checking algorithm in ghc, it was corrected quite quickly.
As per language themselves, Clean purported to have uniqueness types which should make programming better and easier and Clean developers came with special syntax to reuse same names during processing unique-typed values. Which is essentially a Haskell's do notation in disguise, except it cannot be used for different purposes, like non-deterministic List monad. At about 2008 or slightly earlier, type system of Haskell became powerful enough to erase bindings from environments (famous HList by Oleg Kiselyov), allowing one to express many things, including linear and unique types (example [1] - if state's parameters can change number of bindings, we can check for bindings' erasure, expressing linear (all bindings are erased, except ones returned) and unique (some bindings can be left) types).
You can't compare fixing some quadratic time behavior in one place (the type checker) to something that sounds like could be a major piece of work: multilingual character support in UI. If it only goes to ISO latin, it's probably using 8 bit strings, and assuming that bytes and characters are 1:1.
Also, the average Haskell developer practically exists for the purpose of fixing quadratic behaviors in type checkers; you file that bug at 3 a.m. on December 25, and by 8 you have a shiny fix under the tree.
The code I've asked contains two calls instead of one, aside of that it was quite simple and would allow at least Russian users of Clean to have proper dialog titles.
I guess it is nothing like "major piece of work". It was a fix for peculiarities of Windows UI of that era - dialog titles required different approach than dialog fields.
Cool that you found this. I’m a student at this university and most alumni I’ve spoken say it is only used for research and a masters degree course course [1]. What’s interesting is that the bachelor course on functional programming gets thought in Haskell.
The undergraduate course was taught in Clean until a few years ago. Learning functional programming in Clean is a nightmare because it is impossible to find any helpful resources online about the language and the tooling is useless compared to Haskell's.
> In simplistic terms, Clean seems to be a “better Haskell”.
Actually Haskell is a better (or at least, standardised) Clean.
There was a lot of interest in lazy functional programming in the 1980s, but everyone made their own mutually-incompatible systems (e.g. Clean, Miranda, and I heard that even Scheme was debating laziness at one point).
Eventually a committee came together to standardise on a single language (which could be extended in interesting ways). The result was Haskell.
An important point was to be non-proprietary, wasn't it? Clean and Miranda were proprietary, although the implementations are now available with permissive licences.
It's a pity this info is so hard to find. I had to click for a minute to find some example code, and thought: this is very much like Haskell.
I wonder how it's better than Haskell, why not Idris/Coq/Adga, and why not contribute to any of the just mentioned projects. This info, combined with some code and a description of the target audience of the project would be very helpful indeed.
I don't think anybody claims it's better than Haskell. It predates it, for one. The Clean programming language is its own thing, with its own philosophy, uniqueness types, etc.
Don't be mislead by the usual online flamebait trying to turn everything into "X is better than Y". This is usually claimed by people with little experience in either X or Y.
I remember looking at Clean at the time when Haskell98 was new. It had uniqueness types at the time and this seemed really cool for efficient destructive updates. But all the excitement was with Haskell.
I suspect this is more a question of experience than of language. Getting too carried away with the idioms and properties of a specific language will be mitigated by learning about different computation models / type systems and the languages that implement them. Sooner or later you learn that software development is about trade-offs and you choose the right tool for the job.
https://clean.cs.ru.nl/FAQ
In simplistic terms, Clean seems to be a “better Haskell”.
Edit: I just downloaded the bundle tar, looked at some sources and found out that vim has syntax coloring for Clean out of the box. Vim never ceases to amaze me.
More Edit: Clean transpiles to C, which means that when you look at generated code, or just disassemble the resulting binary, you will probably be able to make sense of what you see. When I disassemble a Haskell binary, I can't make heads or tails of it.