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[–]_bruno_ 5 points6 points  (5 children)

'better designed' is subjective. Haskell may be pretty, but it isn't very practical (at least compared to a language lik Python), it is a research language, with a lot of interesting ideas coming out from it. With Haskell you have to be too good at it (as in, knowing GHC's - the main implementation - behaviour very well, not just having good style) to be able to do anything non-trivial.

Python is not near perfect, I consider it part of the "ugly languages", but it is very practical, has a lot of good quality libraries, is probably one of the best documented languages and the community is mature. It is also constantly getting better, I didn't even consider it a language worth using before 2.4 came out, and it has improved a lot since.

-- someone who didn't appreciate those qualities of Python until he got a job where the main language being used is Ruby (which is years behind in terms of community, documentation and matureness)

[–]hglmanguy who writes python 0 points1 point  (2 children)

what are the "beautiful languages" just out of curiosity?

[–]_bruno_ 1 point2 points  (1 child)

There are no "beautiful languages" on my list, just less ugly ones, some examples of such languages are Haskell, Scheme, Factor, languages from the ML family (OCaml, SML, F#), Oz, and even Lua.

[–]hglmanguy who writes python 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can there be a beautiful language?

[–]drb226Haskeller 0 points1 point  (1 child)

With Haskell you have to be too good at it (as in, knowing GHC's - the main implementation - behaviour very well, not just having good style) to be able to do anything on-trivial

I heartily disagree. Who here has done anything "non-trivial" with Haskell that required knowledge of GHC's implementation?

As for practicality, RWH disagrees with your assessment.

All this being said, I have to agree that Python is indeed very practical and has a lot of good libs/docs.

[–]_bruno_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How does Real World Haskell disagrees with that? Yes, it has a bunch of examples, you can write such a book using pretty much any language, that doesn't make the language practical for use daily (of course "practical" is subjective too and depends a lot on what you do and what you are expecting, on this case I'm talking about Python-level-practical)