Haskell the next language for Rubyists?

by Alexis Midon on Mar 16, 2007 |

In his last post, Antonio Cangiano gives his personal definition of evangelism:

Bringing to the attention of other programmers innovations that I find, which can make us more productive or help us produce better software. It's a matter of awareness, there is no intention of pushing anything on anyone.

He explains that finding interesting innovations requires to explore new languages and frameworks and that passion for learning is the only motivation.

Now that Ruby has no secret for him, Antonio Cangiano lists the main criteria for selecting a new language to learn. He argues that only functional languages could meet the new concurrency requirements introduced by multiple core/processor architectures. In passing, he points out that Ruby green threading model cannot leverage such architectures.

If we have 2,4 or 16 cores, we better start thinking about how to develop applications that take full advantage of them. Concurrent and parallel programming can be quite tedious and error prone when adopting languages that are not designed for these requirements. Ruby's current lack of native threads is then particularly unfortunate in these scenarios, as it implies that Ruby will take advantage of a single processor only.

Keeping only Erlang and Haskell on his short list, Antonio Cangiano explains his personal choice for Haskell as a new personal challenge and concludes with a "How to get started with Haskell" section.

Related Editorial

Infographic: Just How Big is the Nerd Economy

Speed Matters: See why Nike, Groupon, and Comcast are using New Relic

eBook: The New Kingmakers - How Developers Conquered the World

Building Content-Driven Apps - Couchbase and Elasticsearch for Content and Metadata Stores

Beyond HTML5 and Native Development: Build Richer, More Functional Mobile Applications

Related Sponsor

Get code level visibility into your web apps. All for free.

Try New Relic Today.

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Community comments

Broken link by Ricky Clarkson Posted

Re: Haskell the next language for Rubyists? by Neil Bartlett Posted

Re: Haskell the next language for Rubyists? by Michel Löhr Posted

Check out the "rubyonrails" framework for erlang by Christian Kvalheim Posted

making these work with Java and .NET is important too by alexis richardson Posted

Broken link by Ricky Clarkson

Take out the ;jsessionid stuff from the link and it will work.

Re: Haskell the next language for Rubyists? by Neil Bartlett

I'm skipping Ruby and going straight to Haskell!

Re: Haskell the next language for Rubyists? by Michel Löhr

Well that depends on what you actually want to do!

For example, if you want to create a web app, then you are still better off with Ruby on Rails (as far as I know Haskell is still lacking such web framework).

Two other notes:
1. You can still combine with languages, each for their own strenghts.
2. Ruby also has functional (lambda) support builtin, so you can use a (limited) functional approach within Ruby.

Check out the "rubyonrails" framework for erlang by Christian Kvalheim

erlyweb.org/

making these work with Java and .NET is important too by alexis richardson

Hi all, I'd like to submit that there is a healthy middle ground making the best use of all of these. We use Erlang/OTP for concurrency and reliability in our AMQP broker implementation: www.rabbitmq.com. We offer clients in other languages such as Java. OTP has awesome power as a commercial messaging broker platform, and people can use whatever languages they like to access the messaging infrastructure over AMQP. And, if you want to see Erlang in action, you can examine the broker code too. Please take a look and get involved! The RabbitMQ FAQ has helpful references on all this as well.

alexis