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

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

#51

Post by wirrbel » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #32

wirrbel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

indeed, fixed it, thx.

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

#52

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

iak8god wrote: post #41

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Incidentally, this is why prefix notation seems so foreign. (+ 1 2) reads as "plus one two." It might just be the Lisp version of Stockholm Syndrome, but it seems perfectly natural to me to gloss that as "Add one and two."

Good point. (eq (+ 1 2) 3) would read "is add one to two equal to three?" though.

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

#53

Post by akavel » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:48 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…

Now that is the first time I see an explanation which tries to point out some sense in the apparent madness. Appreciated! Would you or someone else knowledgeable be willing to create a guide like this, but spanning all the magic runic incantations known to Haskell wizards? Showing similarities, analogies, etc? And targeted at dumb apprentices like me? I'd be happy to serve as a somewhat (though not perfectly) dumb specimen to bounce explanation attempts off! (email in my profile - just added, in case someone was crazy enough to try to pull that off)

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

#54

Post by denim_chicken » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

Haskell sucks because mutability and strictness are extremely important for writing large complex programs, and Haskell deliberately makes both of these things inconvenient.

Also, Haskell's ecosystem and tooling is still crappy, probably because writing complex programs in Haskell needlessly difficult (due to laziness and immutability).

And the "type-safety" guarantees are a red herring. They are not that useful in practice.

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

#55

Post by iopq » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #26

Findeton wrote: post #14

I just prefer to use languages without a Garbage Collector.

And spend time tracking down memory corruption?

Rust doesn't require you to track down memory corruption in safe code.

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

#56

Post by qb45 » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

hkjgkjy wrote: post #24

Findeton wrote: post #14

I just prefer to use languages without a Garbage Collector.

Any experience doing functional programming without garbage collector? I'm doing a lot of Clojure, and can't really see how it would be a pleasant experience without GC but curious to hear any interesting thoughts.

ATS claims to support memory safe functional programming without GC. I never used this language, though.

IIRC the idea is that allocating memory or writing something through a pointer returns a magic "cookie" value which certifies that the pointer now points to a block of certain size or data of certain type. This cookie can be bound to a variable like any other value and passed to other code together with the pointer so that the code can know that it's safe to access the pointer.

There are rules - cookies can't be pulled out of thin air or cloned, have to be destroyed during deallocation, etc. All of this is checked during compilation and removed from the final executable.

http://www.ats-lang.org/

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

#57

Post by darksaints » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 3:58 PM UTC

Haskell has 3 major problems that are completely distinct in my opinion.

Biggest technical problem: lazy evaluation. Other people have said more than enough here.

Biggest cultural problem: technical oneupmanship and code golf. Haskellers can get so caught up in no-compromises stylistic competition that it makes it hard to get anything done. If you finally finish up something that accomplishes your goals, your teammate is gonna come in and rewrite everything you just wrote so he can feel happy with it too. And then lecture you about how lenses are wonderful and how you need to learn the principle of least power.

Biggest community problem: a small minority of extremely obnoxious and toxic assholes. They raid other communities and make fun of their languages and members. They rant against and mock everything deemed inferior. They treat people like they're idiots for not understanding basic but unfamiliar principles of the language. And nobody ever seems to shut them down, despite the fact that the majority are pretty welcoming.

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

#58

Post by njharman » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 4:03 PM UTC

Findeton wrote: post #14

I just prefer to use languages without a Garbage Collector.

Man! I'd never want to code in language that forces me to manage memory. A boring, solved problem the compiler/run time should handle for me.

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

#59

Post by dllthomas » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 4:04 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…

If you find yourself needing to read Haskell, feel free to ask others how they pronounce things.

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

#60

Post by pmarreck » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 4:20 PM UTC

Findeton wrote: post #14

I just prefer to use languages without a Garbage Collector.

I can tolerate it in Elixir/Erlang because GC is per-process-id (of which there could be dozens or hundreds in a typical Erlang/Elixir app) and not remotely a global world stopper.