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

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

lacerrr wrote: post #38

bluefirebrand wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer Javascript/Go/Python because most of my code is actually doing something instead of just conforming to a Gang Of Four pattern designed to paper over the shortcomings of my tool. I too want my programmers to be thinking about and solving my business problems, not writing boilerplate.

Can you give an example of what kind of boilerplate you mean? Because I feel like modern Java and Kotlin have improved a lot in this area.

Post by dharmab » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #33

mountainriver wrote: post #25

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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…

I feel like this is something that people who use a certain language repeat to themselves until they believe it. Go is big enough that this certainly doesn't hold for tens of thousands of developers.

Post by mbesto » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #18

tharne wrote: post #16

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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…

Post by jpgvm » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 4:56 PM UTC

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.

Post by jpgvm » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

dharmab wrote: post #43

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is something that people who use a certain language repeat to themselves until they believe it. Go is big enough that this certainly doesn't hold for tens of thousands of developers.

In my experience Go's relatively constrained language and standard library coupled with gofmt mean Go code written by entirely different people tends to read fairly consistently.