Haskell or Eiffel

[pete_1967]

I'm planning to learn new language and been considering either of above.

If you have any experience on either, what are the good and bad points?

[Reisswolf]

I am assuming you want to learn the language for your edification.

Haskell is certainly a lot of fun. It helps to know at least some basic ideas from category theory; some of the finer points about monads, etc., become much clearer.

It is unfortunate that Haskell is not used more widely in the workplace. I attribute this to the fact that functional programming is a very new paradigm to most programmers, and they are either unwilling to, or incapable of, learning it well enough to apply its methods to solve real-world problems in the workplace.

I recommend Haskell whole-heartedly.

P. S. I have never worked with Eiffel.

[pete_1967]

I am assuming you want to learn the language for your edification.

Haskell is certainly a lot of fun. It helps to know at least some basic ideas from category theory; some of the finer points about monads, etc., become much clearer.

It is unfortunate that Haskell is not used more widely in the workplace. I attribute this to the fact that functional programming is a very new paradigm to most programmers, and they are either unwilling to, or incapable of, learning it well enough to apply its methods to solve real-world problems in the workplace.

I recommend Haskell whole-heartedly.

P. S. I have never worked with Eiffel.

Yeah, or should I say edutainment :)

Been thinking for a while to take up new language just for fun and to play around with. We use C and Perl for all our apps (and some poor sods need to use Visual Basic/ .NET for client applications) so it won't benefit me directly at work, but of course in a long run, it is always beneficial professionally as well.

Thanks for the opinion about Haskell, I haven't really read about either yet that's why I ask about your guys' opinions.

AFAIK, Eiffel is an ISO standard, but now the company deviated from their own standard with the latest version so I'm bit vary about jumping into it.

[RupertPupkin]

Lisp and/or Scheme would be good choices too.

[skoona]

Ruby and Ruby on Rails would be my vote. Its growing in popularity and immediately useful for both console scripting, classic gui apps, and website development.

James,

[null_pointer_us]

COBOL (http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/08/08/07/1727215.shtml) may be coming back!

:D

[ivancat]

I'd say Python. quite a good language and PyGTK allows to create really good applications (e.g. anaconda installer)

[RupertPupkin]

I think people are missing the point of the poll. Learning additional languages is good, but between Haskell and Eiffel which one should he learn? I voted "Both". I think Eiffel is easier to learn, it's a smaller language, and may seem more familiar for people used to object-oriented programming (OOP). But Haskell is more 'cool', in my opinion, as are most functional programming languages. Thinking in terms of functions and recursion is very different for people used to OOP.

[ivancat]

I think people are missing the point of the poll. Learning additional languages is good, but between Haskell and Eiffel which one should he learn? I voted "Both". I think Eiffel is easier to learn, it's a smaller language, and may seem more familiar for people used to object-oriented programming (OOP). But Haskell is more 'cool', in my opinion, as are most functional programming languages. Thinking in terms of functions and recursion is very different for people used to OOP.

Well, anyone who at least was fond of programming in the 90th (before 98) most likely to be familiar with C and functional programming, and those who stayed in this area for some time should be familiar with the OO approach that become really popular after c++ was standardized. So, yes, both, is the right variant to choose in this particular poll

[pete_1967]

Thanks for the replies and opinions so far everyone.

As RupertPupkin above says: I'm just looking for opinions on those 2 languages.

I use C and Perl daily at work (well, programming in C and scripting in Perl is my job). I know Python and Ruby enough to my needs and haven't the slightest interest to learn more of them.
I use C++ for my own needs every now and then and Php to some back-end scripting. Java nor .Net are not to my taste so those can be left out as well. I'd really love to go back to Assembly but I don't have enough time for it.

The reason I've been thinking of Haskell and Eiffel is that they both seem very interesting and both have unique concepts which should make the learning it/ them fun.

Anyways, if you vote "Neither", then of course feel free to tell your reason and what you think would be better choice ;)

[cgrebeld]

I haven't used Eiffel, but Haskell is pretty cool, I highly recommend it.

[stevea]

I don't have as much free time as I'd like, but I've been using haskell on the side - very cool.
There are a lot of additional haskell packages floating around in the past ~2 years - so it's still growing.

Nothing against eiffel - you should probably learn one new language each year if you are to be taken seriously. I'd pick Haskell first.

[null_pointer_us]

Haskell, definitely. Even if you don't end up using all the languages you learn, you will still have expanded your thinking. There's nothing like having more problem-solving approaches.

FWIW, better Haskell support seems to be a goal for Fedora 10:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes#Improved_Haskell_support

Good timing, eh?

I only looked at Eiffel briefly. Most of the significant design improvements over C++ seem focused around language-specific features like design-by-contract. I suppose some of those concepts could be incorporated into the way you write code in other languages, but I doubt it.

LISP or a derivative would be stellar, too.