Haskell, Lisp, and verbosity
For those of you experienced in both Haskell and some flavor of Lisp, I'm curious how "pleasant" (to use a horrid term) it is to write code in Haskell vs. Lisp.
Some background: I'm learning Haskell now, having earlier worked with Scheme and CL (and a little foray into Clojure). Traditionally, you could consider me a fan of dynamic languages for the succinctness and rapidity they provide. I quickly fell in love with Lisp macros, as it gave me yet another way to avoid verbosity and boilerplate.
I'm finding Haskell incredibly interesting, as it's introducing me to ways of coding I didn't know existed. It definitely has some aspects that seem like they would aid in achieving agility, like ease of writing partial functions. However, I'm a bit concerned about losing Lisp macros (I assume I lose them; truth be told I may have just not learned about them yet?) and the static typing system.
Would anyone who has done a decent amount of coding in both worlds mind commenting on how the experiences differ, which you prefer, and if said preference is situational?
Answer
Short answer:
- almost anything you can do with macros you can do with a higher-order function (and I include monads, arrows, etc.), but it might require more thinking (but only the first time, and it's fun and you'll be a better programmer for it), and
- the static system is sufficiently general that it never gets in your way, and somewhat surprisingly it actually "aids in achieving agility" (as you said) because when your program compiles you can be almost certain that is correct, so this certainty lets you try out things you might be otherwise afraid to try -- there is a "dynamic" feel to programming although it's not the same as with Lisp.
[Note: There is a "Template Haskell" that lets you write macros just as in Lisp, but strictly speaking you should never need it.]