Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by formula1 » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #19

manojlds wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can wolf fencing work on unsorted if you have to find out where it happens? Wouldnt that involve iterating on each item to find out where the wolf is?

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

#32

Post by JadeNB » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

wirrbel wrote: post #25

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…

I felt the same way (and still do in general, with notable exceptions). I.e. to put this first: I think a lot of the Haskell community is obsessed with mathematical "cuteness", which basically they take to mean "infix-operator-heavy" notation. Nevertheless, I have learned to like some operators, , *>, are ones that come to my mind. The operator is basically fmap as infix notation, so `fmap f [1,2,3]` would be `f [1,2…

I think that your second indented block, which is currently

, is supposed to be `` (based on the rest of your discussion).

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

#33

Post by bernalex » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

Hallo. I see some of you are listing things here. It really would be very helpful to me if you could list them on Reddit as well, using the format of the thread, so that I only have one source to deal with.

I don't mean to instigate any Reddit vs. Hacker News rivalry, or whatever, but I just don't have time to go over several sources for my talk and PDF. So this is just a tip for if you want me to include your Haskell "complaint".

Glad to see the thread has sparked discussion here too!

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

#34

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

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…

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.

Incidentally, this is why prefix notation seems so foreign. (+ 1 2) reads as "plus one two."

It's possible to overcome this, with dedication. (And it's worth doing.)

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

#35

Post by adsofhoads » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #5

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…

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…

What's with capturing large predators? My book on complex analysis euphemizes building a descending sequence of sets which converge to a point by

> If R is the continent of Africa and we select R_n as that subregion which contains the biggest lion in Africa, we have an algorithm for capturing a big lion—we simply build a cage around point z_0.

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

#36

Post by virmundi » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

Mine is that it's built on a lie. A nobel lie, but a lie none the less. In order to be pure it has "stop the world and record it" with monads to do any IO. It pretends that the world can be snapped shotted and immutable. In reality the monad is only an extra box with a belief that the world stops. The world in fact does not.

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

#37

Post by TheEzEzz » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #29

amelius wrote: post #6

My 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 co…

I haven't found a language where that isn't the case.

The Roslyn C# compiler is exposed as various libraries (and is open source) and is quite nice to work with. I was able to utilize it to make a C#-to-HLSL/GLSL compiler fairly easily.

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

#38

Post by nemoniac » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #29

amelius wrote: post #6

My 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 co…

I haven't found a language where that isn't the case.

You should check out Scheme. It has thorough documentation even including a complete formal denotational semantics.

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

#39

Post by true_religion » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

formula1 wrote: post #31

brianwawok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can wolf fencing work on unsorted if you have to find out where it happens? Wouldnt that involve iterating on each item to find out where the wolf is?

Binary search is looking for a value. Wolf-fencing is looking for a side-effect of that value.

As per analogy, you're not checking an animal in Alaska to see if it is a wolf, you are waiting till the wolf howls (side effect of wolf-existence) then focusing your efforts in that area.

So you can't really use wolf-fencing to say... find a number in an array; it makes no sense.

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

#40

Post by oldmanmike » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

Tyr42 wrote: post #27

POSIXprog wrote: post #7

Bryan 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 an…

My perspective on this is that lazy be default made sticking to purity much more compelling as if you just dropped print statements in you weren't sure exactly when they get evaluated. This lead to important developments like IO (they started with user input just being a lazy list! Very possible to accidentally block trying to read too much), which might not have happened otherwise. But now, I do feel like lazy is be…

"My perspective on this is that lazy be default made sticking to purity much more compelling as if you just dropped print statements in you weren't sure exactly when they get evaluated."

And that's basically a death sentence to the feature because it reduces it to a silver lining of desperate post-mortem optimism. As far as my understanding goes, lazy evaluation was originally included in the language because it was perceived to be a powerful optimization technique enabled by pure functional programming. You reduce the amount of work a program is doing dynamically at runtime while not trading off on readability or modularity. All win. Except there were subtle trade-offs that have made themselves clear over the years and like you said, most would agree that lazy-by-default is too extreme of a feature and doesn't really pay its share of the rent at the end of the day.

My main gripe with lazy evaluation is that it's implicit behavior. It's to evaluation what garbage collection is to memory or dynamic types are to types. It hides something from the programmer that is useful to know more often than not.