Advanced programming languages (2009)

This post is very fortuitous for me. I've been looking to learn a functional language and I had more or less narrowed my options to Haskell, OCaml and Scala. I liked the breakdown between these languages and the resources. Can anyone who programs in Haskell or OCaml regularly tell me the current state of standard and third party library support? I'm very attracted to Scala because it has JVM support, which sounds fantastic for overall ecosystem maturity. That said, I…

> I don't do a lot of artificial intelligence, natural-language processing or machine-learning research, but if I did, Haskell would be my first pick there too. This is definitely a dated article, since the obvious choice today would be Python, but I have to wonder: why aren't the "more expressive" (which in this post seems to be a synonym for "functional") languages used in these fields? I don't have much experience with ML languages, but it seems to me that…

Some thoughts. The people I know who do work in machine learning (Jon Kleinberg, Thorsten Joachims, and their students) work in straight-up C, not Haskell, as the author suggests. Most of the dominant methods used today, such as the SVM, boosting, and the dynamic programming methods used in genomics are (i) numerical more than symbolic and (ii) involve moving a LOT of data around, so you want control of your data structures. (Sometimes these guys compress in-memory pointers!) I looked…

I agree with this article but I have to admit I'm tired of learning programming languages after a number of years in this industry. I've had gigs in just about everything and now I'm purposely restricting my efforts to just a couple different languages even if there is money on the table for work in something else. You can do just about everything in any mature language - after a while of so to say exploring the landscape for a…