[clean-list] Re: Any scheduled release data for Clean 2.3?

Fri Nov 7 06:19:12 MET 2008

That sounds great.

It seems rather strange that although Clean is very fast, it does not
seem used very much in comparison with such other functional languages
as Haskell and Scheme.

Although this has been discussed on this mailing list before, one
possible reason that I can think of is the lack of an interactive
environment, which tends to be more important with an
academically-oriented functional language than with an
industry-oriented one.  In many other functional languages that are
widely used, such as Haskell, Scheme, OcaML, and Erlang, the presence
of a REPL encourages so-called "exploratory programming," in which
students of the language who are taking courses in college try out
code snippets interactively before including them in the program
proper.

Clean comes with an IDE, instead of a REPL, and while this is
sufficient for industry use, it tends to discourage exploratory
programming, in turn discouraging the use of Clean in an academic
context, in particular in college courses.  This orients Clean more
toward an industrial programming language; however, since people in
industry tend to prefer widely-used languages with good library
support, in addition to a fast language, the fact that Clean is not
already sufficiently widely used then leads people to compare Clean
with the very similar language Haskell, which is also a non-strict,
purely functional programming language.

Previously, Clean was much faster than GHC, the main Haskell compiler,
but GHC has been narrowing the margin with each update while releasing
a great number of libraries, so speed is becoming less and less a
distinguishing factor.  On the other hand, ease of use is one of the
main advantages that functional programming languages tend to have
over procedural and object-oriented programming languages, but when
compared to most other functional programming languages, Clean lacks
the REPL that most other such languages have.

If the development of a REPL for Clean would be too expensive for the
developers in terms of time and resources, would there be any
possibility of starting some kind of open-source project to create a
REPL for Clean?

With logic programming languages, although Mercury is relatively fast
when compared to Prolog, perhaps one reason that many users prefer
SICStus Prolog, which is also fast, to Mercury is the existence of a
REPL.

SICStus costs 153 euros for a personal license, yet manages to hold
its own against SWI-Prolog, a free version, because it is fast,
reliable, well-documented, and has a REPL.  If cost is an issue,
perhaps you could follow the example of the Swedish Institute of
Computer Science and charge a similar fee (with a free evaluation
period) for a similar version of Clean with a REPL?  That would enable
you to offset the development costs.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

On Thu, 6 Nov 2008 13:02:08 +0100, "rinus plasmeijer" <rinus at cs.ru.nl>
wrote:

>Hi Bejamin,
>
>Very good question!
>
>John van Groningen is working hard on the new version of the compiler.
>The idea is that this new system will accept Haskell '98 source code and 
>that one can mix Haskell with Clean modules as well.
>This is quite a big change in the (front end of) the compiler.
>To be able to mix modules has lot's of consequences: In Haskell one can use 
>Clean stuf (like uniqueness typing) and in Clean one can use Haskell stuf 
>(eg Haskell records which are different from Clean records). Since one has 
>to be able to call one from another, there have to be denotations for each 
>feature in each language as well.
>Also one has to be able to mix libraries (Clean's StdEnv and Haskell's 
>prelude).
>Finally the IDE has to be adjusted to deal with the new situation.
>Haskell's lack of a good module structure does not make life easy...
>
>And John likes to make things reliable, but also fast...
>We hope to achieve a compiler which compiles fast and produces excellent 
>code, also for the new features..
>This takes time.
>
>Before the end of the year we hope to have a beta-version which we can use 
>here internally.
>
>Before we can release it externally we need to add documentation.
>The list of added features will be long....
>
>We have indeed made some bug fixes, but there are not that many.
>So, we will not release a new compiler just for that.
>
>greetings,
>
>Rinus
>
>
>
>
>
>
>"Benjamin L. Russell" <DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com> wrote in message 
>news:jn92h4pna8uctrd2uoqk0pmdrn9b6tmpnv at 4ax.com...
>> Actually, come to think of it, the data, in addition to the date,
>> might also be useful; specifically, the following:
>>
>> * bug fixes (if any)
>> * changes/added features
>> * changes in the documentation
>> * a new weekly "Clean Report" on what's happening in the Clean
>> community
>>
>> So, in light of the above which just came to mind, and just to be
>> pedantic, let me reinstate my original subject:
>>
>> "Any scheduled release data for Clean 2.3?"
>>
>> and include the predicted date as chronological data.  There:  It
>> wasn't a typo after all. ;-)
>>
>> -- Benjamin L. Russell
>>
>> On Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:39:13 +0900, "Benjamin L. Russell"
>> <DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Sorry; the subject should have been as follows:
>>>
>>>"Any scheduled release date for Clean 2.3?"
>>>
>>>(I.e., replace "data" with "date" in the original subject.)
>>>
>>>Sorry for the typo.
>>>
>>>-- Benjamin L. Russell
>>>
>>>On Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:36:09 +0900, "Benjamin L. Russell"
>>><DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>Since there hasn't been much activity here lately, I just wanted to
>>>>check if there was any tentative release date for Clean 2.3, and if
>>>>so, what changes, if any, might be scheduled.
>>>>
>>>>-- Benjamin L. Russell
>>
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