Can Haskell Programming Language Outperform C as Hoskinson Suggests?

Cardano's domain-specific language for financial smart contracts is built on Haskell, says Hoskinson

During the late 1980s as that is, the era of new languages and paradigms were invented. A group of researchers started developing Haskell a purely functional programming language. It was finally published in 1990. It is named based on a U.S. mathematician Haskell Brooks Curry. Haskell is a modern, standard, purely functional programming and non-strict language. It is Specially designed to handle a wide range of applications, from numerical to symbolic. It has an expressive syntax and very rich inbuilt architecture. Haskell is a purely functional, non-strict programming language. It is Specially designed to cope with large-scale industrial production applications. It is known for its rich built architecture. Haskell programs are written as Mathematical functions.

Haskell is very competitive with C, and on some benchmarks, it is faster. In C, it's strict evaluation, you put a function there, and it executes one line at a time. It's how you should think of C executing. It's going to call this line. Everything on this line is going to finish before we get to the next line. In Haskell, that's not the case. You can call something, give it a name, and it doesn't actually do anything yet. The compiler can actually analyze it and a lot of times figure it out.

Some of the Features of Haskell that Make it Different from Other Programming Languages

Static Types

Haskell is statically typed. When you compile your program, the compiler knows which piece of code is a number, which is a string, and so on. That means that a lot of possible errors are caught at compile time. If you try to add together a number and a string, the compiler will whine at you.

Rich Types

Haskell uses a very good type system that has type inference. That means that you don't have to explicitly label every piece of code with a type because the type system can intelligently figure out a lot about it.

Elegant and Concise

Haskell is elegant and concise. Because it uses a lot of high-level concepts, Haskell programs are usually shorter than their imperative equivalents. And shorter programs are easier to maintain than longer ones and have fewer bugs.

Metaprogramming

Haskell supports the inspection and generation of the program's abstract syntax tree. This feature is called Template Haskell, and it's used for compile-time evaluation and to automate boilerplate generation.

What did Charles Hoskinson Suggest about the Haskell Programming Language?

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently engaged in a Twitter debate on programming languages with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Elon Musk had been gently asked by a Tesla enthusiast to include software notes in the Tesla app. Elon Musk highlighted his hatred for contemporary C++ in his response to the Twitter user, but his fondness for plain C, which former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey concurred with.

"Just wait until you people discover Haskell," said Charles Hoskinson, who contributed to the thread. Cardano's smart contract programming language and Marlowe, the domain-specific language for financial smart contracts, are both built on Haskell. Cardano's off-chain and on-chain codes are both written in Haskell. However, Haskell isn't one of the most popular programming languages.

Cardano, on the other hand, selected Haskell because it believes its Plutus and Marlowe smart contracts can be properly built-in in a precise, formally proven language that delivers a high level of assurance right away. This follows the devastating effects of the resulting vulnerabilities, code failures, and smart contract exploits on blockchains and smart contract languages, which have resulted in substantial financial losses, generally in the billions of dollars.