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POAre functional programming languages good for practical tasks?
 

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    <p>It seems to me from my experimenting with Haskell, Erlang and Scheme that functional programming languages are a fantastic way to answer scientific questions. For example, taking a small set of data and performing some extensive analysis on it to return a significant answer. It's great for working through some tough Project Euler questions or trying out the Google Code Jam in an original way.</p> <p>At the same time it seems that by their very nature, they are more suited to finding analytical solutions than actually performing practical tasks. I noticed this most strongly in Haskell, where everything is evaluated lazily and your whole program boils down to one giant analytical solution for some given data that you either hard-code into the program or tack on messily through Haskell's limited IO capabilities.</p> <p>Basically, the tasks I would call 'practical' such as</p> <pre>Aceept a request, find and process requested data, and return it formatted as needed</pre> <p>seem to translate much more directly into procedural languages. The most luck I have had finding a functional language that works like this is Factor, which I would liken to a reverse-polish-notation version of Python.</p> <p>So I am just curious whether I have missed something in these languages or I am just way off the ball in how I ask this question. Does anyone have examples of functional languages that are great at performing practical tasks or practical tasks that are best performed by functional languages?</p>
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    1. COYou looked at Erlang and couldn't see a practical use for it? Really? Despite Erlang having been invented specifically for practical use? And having been put to practical use in telephony for a long time already? How closely did you really look at it?!
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    2. COIt sounds like you were looking at Haskell as a language primarily suited to finding analytical solutions. Lazy evaluation has zero impact on this (all it does is increase the class of programs that terminate without encountering an error, and give you somewhat unintuitive performance characteristics). And I'm not sure why you say Haskell's IO capabilities are limited.
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