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The inability to determine the order of program execution is what made me give up haskell for ocaml and scala. Does that make me a bad programmer?


Don't worry, you're in good company, for example: http://janestreet.com/

I (a Haskeller) interviewed there, and ended up in an long debate with their CTO Yaron Minsky poking at warts in each other's pet languages and patterns of thought -- in retrospect we were trolling each other pretty hard just as a natural reflex.


Why do you care what order your functions run in Haskell? Seems to me you want them to run as late as possible and no sooner.


He doesn't. What he really cares about is memory consumption, especially stack consumption. Order of execution can influence that a lot: unevaluated chunks may hold quite a lot memory, and their evaluation in normal order may overflow the stack (in most implementations).

These problems are called "lazyness leaks". This is why he still cares about order of evaluation.




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