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Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#121

Post by ParetoOptimal »

mountainriver wrote: post #25
jpgvm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get slightly better people but still the wrong people. JS is almost never the right tool for the job, Go is occasionally the right tool for the job, mainly if you need to write something that moves bytes from one fd to another without much in the way of business logic. TBH if you are building something boring you should just use Spring w/Java or Kotlin. This will attract pragmatists that ship code that works…

Go doesn’t attract mediocrity it attracts pragmatism. I worked on a Scala team for a couple years, had a lot of devs that were “smart”, problem was they wrote really fancy code no one could understand. I then switched to a Go team and it was night and day. I was wildly more productive and the people in the community were not lacking intelligence. Go prioritizes community, it believes that “us” is more impactful than…

> Go doesn’t attract mediocrity it attracts pragmatism.

It attracts "pragmatism" and "simplicity" in my experience, but in the prescence of cheap optimal solutions the worse alternative is chosen to preserve that pragmatic image.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#122

Post by ParetoOptimal »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #22
jpgvm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where I differ. I think the Python/JS/Go crew gets you stuff that is built poorly and becomes expensive to maintain. I much prefer the JVM and ASP.NET crew because they are 9-5 programmers, their tools aren't constantly changing so for the most part they only need to spend time actually doing work. No fighting with package managers, no updating the latest framework and solving backwards incompatibilities for…

> I think the Python/JS/Go crew Genuine question: are these people a crew? I doubt very much each individual constituency in that trio would think so. JS and Go are really very different things with different mindsets. Python vs JS likewise.

There's a big overlap. I moved to Go from Python and tons of Python conferences had Go presentations and familiar names picking up Go.

Same with js, notably that Tj van der something guy.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#123

Post by ParetoOptimal »

xupybd wrote: post #75
tharne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can cut both ways. Yes, if you choose Haskell, a Lisp, or something like Erlang, you can get smarter/better devs. But the flip side of that is that the types of people who tend to gravitate toward those languages are often more interested in programming for it's own sake and not the domain they're working in. So you get things like people burning hours writing their own libraries and endless tinkering with progr…

I've picked up F# out of a need to get things done. I got sick of learning framework after framework just to keep relevant. F# is niche so it moves a little slower. The results have been fantastic. Not only can I solve business problems faster, I'm happier with the resulting code. It's easier to read, test and alter. I've found some languages a nightmare to work with. Specifically Perl and JS. I've seen brilliant cod…

Plus the F# community is big on DDD.

And type providers are super super nice.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#124

Post by ParetoOptimal »

nphard85 wrote: post #35
jpgvm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get slightly better people but still the wrong people. JS is almost never the right tool for the job, Go is occasionally the right tool for the job, mainly if you need to write something that moves bytes from one fd to another without much in the way of business logic. TBH if you are building something boring you should just use Spring w/Java or Kotlin. This will attract pragmatists that ship code that works…

And yet there are hardly any software written in Haskell or Ocaml that are widely used or have any notable positive impact on the modern digital world, compared to those written in languages like Go, C++ or Python. edit: ps: Big fan of OCaml, but have since moved on to Go and Python for getting things done in the real world.

> And yet there are hardly any software written in Haskell or Ocaml that are widely used or have any notable positive impact on the modern digital world,

It's used in supply chain management at target.

IIRC at Starbucks too.

Oh, and ever use Facebook chat? Haskell is running over your messages to filter out spam.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#126

Post by jpgvm »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #120
jpgvm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spring relies heavily on the more powerful features of the Java runtime which aren't available in Go, it wouldn't be possible to port it as-is. You could definitely come up with a set of existing Go libraries that implement all the core functionality of a Spring up in a cohesive way. Almost every large company I have been at has done exactly that however none has caught on in the same way Spring has. Spring hasn't "f…

What runtime does Spring utilize that Go doesn't have from ... say .. the XML conf files era of Spring? I understand annotations and classpath scanning are entirely different animals. I guess AOP magic doesn't exist either. Json/Yaml versions of the xml era should be possible. I guess no xml namespace magic (which I hated)...but a consistent object graph specification would seem useful.

Yeah I think if you can come up with a good IoC implementation the rest would fall into place.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#127

Post by Tozen »

tharne wrote: post #16
jpgvm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get slightly better people but still the wrong people. JS is almost never the right tool for the job, Go is occasionally the right tool for the job, mainly if you need to write something that moves bytes from one fd to another without much in the way of business logic. TBH if you are building something boring you should just use Spring w/Java or Kotlin. This will attract pragmatists that ship code that works…

This can cut both ways. Yes, if you choose Haskell, a Lisp, or something like Erlang, you can get smarter/better devs. But the flip side of that is that the types of people who tend to gravitate toward those languages are often more interested in programming for it's own sake and not the domain they're working in. So you get things like people burning hours writing their own libraries and endless tinkering with progr…

"But the flip side of that is that the types of people who tend to gravitate toward those languages are often more interested in programming for it's own sake and not the domain they're working in. So you get things like people burning hours writing their own libraries and endless tinkering with programming minutiae instead of getting sh* done."

Don't agree with everything, but this part is a very good point.

Re: Ask HN: Why would anyone choose Haskell to develop applications?

#128

Post by Tozen »

nphard85 wrote: post #70
jpgvm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is mostly used in speciality applications. I have a few friends that work on flight control software for satellites and their stuff is all OCaml which is apparently not that uncommon in their field. That said none of them knew OCaml before joining said company and thus none were hired because of it... so that does somewhat invalidate the "right" people argument but I guess if you are doing literal rocket scienc…

FWIW, SpaceX uses C++ for flight control software. It actually makes more sense for such hard realtime applications.

I read somewhere that Elon Musk prefers C, and doesn't appear to be too fond of class-based OOP.
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