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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?

#21

Post by DavidWoof »

pengstrom wrote: post #8

When I asked my current employer why they chose it, they simply responded that it attracts the "right" people. From a business perspective, any language is arbitrary. What matters is having clever people around to solve problems.

I think that's more true in the negative sense. It's not that it attracts the "right" people, it's that it repels the "wrong" people. There plenty of clever efficient devs working in Java or JS but they're surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.

And since the interview process is imprecise the point of being broken, it's very useful to attract the right people in the first place.

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

#22

Post by unfocussed_mike »

jpgvm wrote: post #18
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…

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.

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

#24

Post by mountainriver »

4e530344963049 wrote: post #20
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…

"JS is almost never the right tool for the job" Except, you know, in the browser...

Yeah I didn’t get that part, JS is one of the most used languages because of the browser

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

#25

Post by mountainriver »

jpgvm wrote: post #15
RapperWhoMadeIt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the same applies to building a RESTful API and choosing Go instead of js :)

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 “me”. This is its biggest strength, and is often lost on people looking in from the outside.

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

#26

Post by aoms »

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.

No, it just means the people that tend to be attracted to these types of languages. Easy to get started languages that hide much of the inner workings from you as a dev.

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

#27

Post by mark_l_watson »

I like the separation between pure and impure code. In his Haskell class Eric Meijer said that pure code are like islands and monadic code is like the ocean, and as programmers we decide how much of a system is pure code.

Sorry for being off topic: the new M1 Macs seem to take some of the pain out of large runtimes for compile/build in languages like Haskell and Swift. I don’t have any benchmarks, this is just very noticeable when I am coding.

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

#29

Post by UnpossibleJim »

mountainriver wrote: post #24
4e530344963049 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"JS is almost never the right tool for the job" Except, you know, in the browser...

Yeah I didn’t get that part, JS is one of the most used languages because of the browser

Web Assembly is right around the corner... still =P

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

#30

Post by ausudhz »

jpgvm wrote: post #15
RapperWhoMadeIt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the same applies to building a RESTful API and choosing Go instead of js :)

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…

Any turing complete language can do what you need, the rest is just preference.

Spring boot is garbage to be

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