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Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

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Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#11

Post by marcosdumay »

hacker_9 wrote: post #8
zzzcpan wrote: post #3

Most 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…

> 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.

What does that even mean in a language with no explicit model for code sequencing?

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#12

Post by vog »

manojlds wrote: post #10
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bisection is also a well-known term, in mathematics as well as computer science.

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#13

Post by sisu »

zzzcpan wrote: post #3

Most 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…

"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."

This problem is significantly worse in Haskell than in most other languages. Usually you lose at most a constant factor in performance if the compiler doesn't optimize as much as you expected, but the lazy evaluation can actually change the asymptotic memory complexity. I have been bitten by lazy evaluation several times by writing code that I expect to run in constant space and then finding it require linear amount of memory because of the evaluation order.

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#15

Post by akavel »

Haven't seen it listed neither here nor there, so not sure if I'm the only one, but: for me, the first and currently blocking obstacle is of "graphical" syntax. I'm of the kind of people who hear the words they read as a voice in their head, so when every line is interspersed with multiple "random" >>= -,-'-- and whatnot other ascii-art I can't verbalise, I distictly feel my brain stumble, mumble, and grind to a halt and sad emptiness. And I don't even know how to google any one of them. Don't know how to solve this for myself. I've once found a list of suggested names for some common ones, but - I don't like having to learn all that by heart before I even start with the language; and also I feel pretty certain those are not all, and many libraries seem to like to invent their own new ones, so back to square one.

That's I believe the main reason I find SML more attractive: it seems to use operators to a much, much lesser extent, apparently preferring alphanumeric function names in the core, and in 3rdparty libraries too.

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#16

Post by vog »

zzzcpan wrote: post #3

Most 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…

> My major gripe with haskell was that I could never tell the space/time complexity of the my code without serious analysis

This is really a serious issue. The only other language where I ever had this issue was SQL. I had a project where we have lots of nested Views. We had to rephrase the SQL in sometimes very non-obvious ways, introducing intermediate Array results, CTEs, switching between sub SELECTs and JOINs -- all this just to convince the Query Planner to use a different Query Plan. That made a difference between In the end, this is why I prefer languages OCaml or SML over Haskell. (Rust on the horizon)

Roughly speaking, in Haskell you can prove "just" correctness, while in OCaml you can prove correctness as well as performance.

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#17

Post by tedmiston »

manojlds wrote: post #10
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wolf fencing is new to me too.

It seems to be used only in the context of debugging. While with git bisect, we are also repeatedly ~halving the remaining search space, the list of commits isn't "sorted" like the precondition for binary search.

You could argue that commits are sorted against time. But I would say that's different because we don't know which commit hash we're looking for -- we just want to find the point in time when our code stopped working, not that I've ever had to use it before ;).

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#18

Post by jgallag8 »

akavel wrote: post #15

Haven't seen it listed neither here nor there, so not sure if I'm the only one, but: for me, the first and currently blocking obstacle is of "graphical" syntax. I'm of the kind of people who hear the words they read as a voice in their head, so when every line is interspersed with multiple "random" >>= -,-'-- and whatnot other ascii-art I can't verbalise, I distictly feel my brain stumble, mumble, and grind to a halt…

Hoogle could help with the searching problem: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#19

Post by brianwawok »

manojlds wrote: post #10
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Binary search sounds kind of 2D. Wolf fence also lets you work with unsorted data.

I.e. if I asked you to find a squeaky noise coming from somewhere in your house. Does it make sense to "binary search" your 3D 3-story house?

Wolf fencing makes more sense.. stand on floor 2, see if it is on your floor. Or is it coming from the stairwell to floor 3, or the starwell to floor 1? You just used 1 step to narrow your search space down by 1/3.

How would you sort your house so you can binary sort it?

Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

#20

Post by bojo »

akavel wrote: post #15

Haven't seen it listed neither here nor there, so not sure if I'm the only one, but: for me, the first and currently blocking obstacle is of "graphical" syntax. I'm of the kind of people who hear the words they read as a voice in their head, so when every line is interspersed with multiple "random" >>= -,-'-- and whatnot other ascii-art I can't verbalise, I distictly feel my brain stumble, mumble, and grind to a halt…

It can be overwhelming, and trying to use Google is terrible. There's a really nice Haskell specific search engine though: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ - you can query module/function names, type signatures, etc.

A lot of these weird "operators" are also typically defined with a synonymous named function. These types of operators are usually functions after all, not actual language operators.

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