[clean-list] Is clean the language for me?

[Fabien Todescato]

Dear Ronald and Mark,

	I do use Clean for professional programming activities on WINTEL and
find it really a top-notch programming tool. Not only is the language
state-of-the-art, on a similar footing as Haskell, but the system comes
equipped with an easy-to-use integrated development environment that bears
the comparison with commercial tools. Furthermore, the compiler - Clean
1.3.3 - is fast and generates fairly efficient machine code.
	Regarding the availability of the open source Clean 2.0 compiler,
you may want to consult the Clean mailing list archive, there was a few
weeks ago some postings about the topic, one of which was a clear statement
made by Pr. Rinus Plasmeijer.
	I work in a electronic CAD environment, where we routinely need
processing huge text files holding either descriptions of electronic boards,
or automatically-generated test programs. We may reasonably argue that there
is a constant factor slowdown between the efficiency of a Clean program, and
an 'equivalent' C or C++ program. That question, however, turns out to be
meaningless in practice. The development effort required to write a Clean
program using sophisticated algorithms and data structure with a good
asymptotic complexity may be equivalent to the development effort required
to write a simple C or C++ program with a poor asymptotic complexity...
	IMO, if you want to learn functional programming in a lazy
functional programming language on the WINTEL platform, you should go for
Clean, would it be only for the beautiful Integrated Development Environment
- written in Clean using the StdIO GUI library -. Also, you may well
discover that the learning environment is a quality production environment
as well. You will find on the Clean Home Page a wealth of documentation,
notably an excellent tutorial book 'Functional Programming in Clean' that
will lead you well on the way. A few libraries are also available to
download, although the offer is not as vast as the one for Haskell.
	Besides, the Clean team seems to be very reactive and willing to
listen to their users. The two times I reported bugs to them, I was answered
with a bug fix in the few hours, or the day following...

	Now, if you are also interested in Object-Oriented programming and
software-engineering issues, you may turn to OCAML which seems to be
generally praised high.

Sincerely yours, Fabien TODESCATO