Mixing Haskell and R

It would be hard to think of two programming languages more dissimilar than Haskell and R.

Haskell was designed to enforce programming discipline; R was designed for interactive use. Haskell emphasizes correctness; R emphasizes convenience. Haskell emphasizes computer efficiency; R emphasizes interactive user efficiency. Haskell was written to be a proving ground for programming language theorists. R was written to be a workbench for statisticians. Very different goals lead to very different languages.

When I first heard of a project to mix Haskell and R, I was a little shocked. Could it even be done? Aside from the external differences listed above, the differences in language internals are vast. I'm very impressed that the folks at Tweag I/O were able to pull this off. Their HaskellR project lets you call R from Haskell and vice versa. (It's primarily for Haskell calling R, though you can call Haskell functions from your R code: Haskell calling R calling Haskell. It kinda hurts your brain at first.) Because the languages are so different, some things that are hard in one are easy in the other.

I used HaskellR while it was under initial development. Our project was written in Haskell, but we wanted to access R libraries. There were a few difficulties along the way, as with any project, but these were resolved and eventually it just worked.