Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
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Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
1–10 of 208 posts
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#2Very interesting and constructive thread. A lot of information about various Haskell warts, problems people have, and possible solutions to overcome some of them.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#3Most of these apply to other languages as well:
"Haskell sucks because compilation takes too long."
"Aye. And it takes too much memory too."
"My major gripe with haskell was that I could never tell the space/time complexity of the my code without serious analysis (that among other things involves second-guessing the compiler's ability to optimize). This makes writing good quality code harder than it needs to be."
"Debugging boils down to wolf-fences and print-statements most of the time"
"Profiling is needed for any stack traces, and is not enabled by default, so you end up spending hours rebuilding your sandbox just to get a stack trace of an error."
"Coming from a Scala background, the tooling seems terribly cumbersome and immature. I couldn't get it to work in IntelliJ."
"You need to turn on dozens of language extensions to do pretty much anything."
"I'm a developer on a pretty large Haskell codebase, and we're in a corner of 'can't add any libraries without them conflicting with each other." Which is OK, by itself, but leads to my biggest complaint of 'why aren't API changes reflected by major/minor versioning'."
"Haskell sucks because both the standard library and the ecosystem lack guiding ideas."
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#4Having these kinds of threads, I think, is very important for the community. On a related note, there has been quite some fallout from the haskell compilation times got worse thread, which resulted in the development of tooling around improving the situation.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#5Most of these apply to other languages as well: "Haskell sucks because compilation takes too long." "Aye. And it takes too much memory too." "My major gripe with haskell was that I could never tell the space/time complexity of the my code without serious analysis (that among other things involves second-guessing the compiler's ability to optimize). This makes writing good quality code harder than it needs to be." "De…
For those who, like me, wondered what wolf-fencing is:
"Wolf fence" algorithm: Edward Gauss described this simple but very useful and now famous algorithm in a 1982 article for communications of the ACM as follows: "There's one wolf in Alaska; how do you find it? First build a fence down the middle of the state, wait for the wolf to howl, determine which side of the fence it is on. Repeat process on that side only, until you get to the point where you can see the wolf."[10] This is implemented e.g. in the Git version control system as the command git bisect, which uses the above algorithm to determine which commit introduced a particular bug.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging]
So now you know what that thing you always end up doing is called :)
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#6My biggest complaint would be about incomplete documentation of GHC. Given that Haskell is a pure functional language, it should be possible to easily use any part of the compiler, and include it in your own project. However, the documentation is rather incomplete, difficult to understand, and always behind the current state of the code. That said, the scientific literature on Haskell is the complete opposite, and contains beautiful work.
Also, I'm wondering why there are so few fully compliant implementations of the internet RFCs. Such specs seem an excellent opportunity to showcase the power of functional languages, yet the implementations keep lacking.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#7Bryan Cantrill's take: https://youtu.be/0T2XFSALOaU?t=2021
My answer would be lazy evaluation by default. It's extremely unusual, and I've never seen a convincing enough justification for it, and it gives rise to performance bugs (space leaks) that can be fiendishly difficult to track down and fix and are disastrous in production. With the arrival of Idris, I think we can pretty conclusively say this was a mistake and that the Miranda branch of the PL family tree is likely to prove to be an evolutionary dead-end.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#8Most of these apply to other languages as well: "Haskell sucks because compilation takes too long." "Aye. And it takes too much memory too." "My major gripe with haskell was that I could never tell the space/time complexity of the my code without serious analysis (that among other things involves second-guessing the compiler's ability to optimize). This makes writing good quality code harder than it needs to be." "De…
I think this shows that the tooling is just as important, if not more important, when choosing a language. Good debugging tools are a must simply because things always go wrong, and if I don't have an IDE that can highlight the line for me and allow to mouse hover over variable values, then the whole experience becomes a lesson in frustration.
Additionally if you expect me to 'write, build, run, repeat' just to test my code, then you better hope you have a fast compiler else I'm going to start associating using your language with the same amount of interest as watching paint dry.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#9>> Haskell sucks because both the standard library and the ecosystem lack guiding ideas. The former often feels like it is an amalgamation of PHD theses that have been abandoned soon after being complete.
That's a bit on the nose. [1]
[1] As in "ouch".
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#10Most of these apply to other languages as well: "Haskell sucks because compilation takes too long." "Aye. And it takes too much memory too." "My major gripe with haskell was that I could never tell the space/time complexity of the my code without serious analysis (that among other things involves second-guessing the compiler's ability to optimize). This makes writing good quality code harder than it needs to be." "De…
For those who, like me, wondered what wolf-fencing is: "Wolf fence" algorithm: Edward Gauss described this simple but very useful and now famous algorithm in a 1982 article for communications of the ACM as follows: "There's one wolf in Alaska; how do you find it? First build a fence down the middle of the state, wait for the wolf to howl, determine which side of the fence it is on. Repeat process on that side only, u…
So, binary search? Why did a new name come up for this well known thing in CS?