2) I think you should look up Xah’s usenet posting history before you back him too much. Not that he might not be right on this issue (I haven’t read the thread), but he’s a serially vulgar cross-posting lunatic who writes ignorant screeds.

3) You don’t come across as cynical, you come across as arrogant and singlemindedly dismissive.

Paul.

Second: the thing you keep missing while reading their posts is that for the most part they are talking about what is right for THEIR LANGUAGE, not what is right for Haskell or even the industry at large. Guido wants to take functional features out of Python because those features DO NOT make Python a functional language. Elliotte wants to leave them out of Java for the same reason.

Yes, Guido did say something negative about Haskell per se, and you have the right to address that. But you also refer to his blog and the debate about reduce(). Guido can rip out functional features from Python without slandering Haskell for the same reason he can leave out features from Prolog or XSLT or Erlang without disparaging those languages.

In summary: you need to sit back, take a few deep breaths and realize that not everything anyone says in the blogosphere is intended to either praise or disparage Haskell. Some people have their own lives programming in their own languages and want to keep those languages simple within their own paradigms. That just leaves more room for Haskell and its siblings to differentiate themselves.

Deep breaths.

As a reformed language advocate myself, I actually would appreciate your vitrol if it were directed at technology and not people.

Elliotte Rusty Harold didn’t once mention Haskell. He did mention functional programming once: “Thus the closure syntax and the for syntax really aren’t equivalent and closures can’t replace for loops. They might supplement them, but this is only relevant if they really can be run on multiple processors simultaneously. In functional systems, this works because there are no side-effects. Thread safety is almost free. However, this isn’t true in Java.”

So once again he didn’t slam functional programming languages, and in fact said something quite positive about them.

With respect to Guido’s comment: I really don’t think that there is any need for cynicism. You say: “Functional programming is not crackpot science that would make people this passionate to fight out against.” Ummm. There was nothing remotely passionate in Guido’s quote. In fact, he said “the talk I most enjoyed was neither about Python nor about C++, but about Haskell and Haskell is incredibly expressive – and not just because it uses a very sparse syntax.”

Reading the three blog posts, the only one that is passionate, vested and slanderous is yours. The others come across as mostly disinterested but mildly curious about Haskell.

A lot of new learners never get to the point of understanding that you basically never write an explicit looping construct or recursive function in Haskell. That is, Haskell really wants to take away your loops and have you work at a higher level of abstraction where you don’t even think about silly things like that.

As much as I admire your cynicism, I think Haskellers have to bear some of the responsibility for the confusion. We’ve allowed the debate to be framed in “their” terms — loops vs. recursion — instead of loops vs. “just say what, not how”.