Tuesday May 28, 2013

Or, Do I Wish The Objective-C Compiler Was Sufficiently Smart?

While trying to channel my inner nerd’s inner nerd, I’ve been learning a bit about Haskell recently. The functional concepts and strong typing intrigue me and I’d love to rely on these tactics to express problems I’m trying to solve in iOS. The idealist in me dreams that all my worries would go away if I could only hop the fence to the other side.

And then I read this article by James Hague:

As much as I admire the Haskell language and the GHC implementation, I find it difficult to form a solid mental model of how Haskell code is executed, partially because that model can change drastically depending on what the compiler does. And that’s the price of being sufficiently smart.

Tradeoffs. A thing.