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Comment by codygman | Hacker News Reader

> Brainfuck, Haskell, Lisp, Assembly, and a slew of other impractical

My argument: Haskell and Lisp are just as practical as Python, Java, C#, or C++ for r/dailyprogrammer problems.

Brainfuck is impractical, I can agree with that.

Haskell is used in the real world. For instance I write Haskell for my day job right now.

Lisp is also used in the real world and was even used to create Lisp Machines[0]. I got contacted by a recruiter for a Clojure job a couple days ago.

I can kind of see why you'd call Assembly impractical for the projects on r/dailyprogrammer, but would like to make sure you aren't claiming Assembly itself is impractical.

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My comment was meant to be along the lines of "/r/dailyprogrammer is a great next step up from /r/learnprogramming", so I made my practicality comment in the context of someone learning a first language wanting to learn from other code examples in their language of choice. If only I had an infinite amount of space to add footnotes and disclaimers.

I don't think the languages are universally impractical or unusable for development (BF excluded). However, I _do_ think that they lack the resources[0] important for beginners that are available with much more widely used languages. Not saying they don't have resources geared to beginners, but I've been bitten enough in many fields (programming, cooking, you name it!) by using something not as mainstream that I can comfortably say "Learn the popular way first, then explore." I guess though, if the goal is to go from zero to a job writing Haskell, then the "popular way" would be to learn Haskell!

Assembly.. I love doing trivial routines in assembly because it feels like a puzzle, but I struggle to think of where I would practically use it. Even on uCs such as ATtiny2313, I gain so much from being able to do control flow in C. The most assembly I've written from college is actually in TIS-100[0], hah.

[0]: http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

[0a] http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html

[0b] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=405

I was in a bit of a hurry, so thanks!

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