Monday, January 24, 2011

How low can Haskell go? (Or what should I do with Haskell?)

Is Haskell a suitable language for programming robots?  Would a robot with a strictly functional brain be safer?  I have run a fairly hairy 2K line Haskell app on a target as small as an Atom based netbook.  It ran reasonably.

I suppose, for a linux target, that a Haskell executable is pretty much like any other executable.

What is the benefit to taking a purely functional approach to robotics?

For some pioneers (think Greenblatt, Stallman, etc) Lisp was a "systems programming" language. Is Haskell a reasonable successor?

These are questions I am pondering.  I am doing some Haskell (here an there -- prototyping stuff at work, etc), but I keep wondering what the killer application would be *for me*.