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Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

tome wrote: post #64
denim_chicken wrote: post #54

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 p…

> Haskell sucks because mutability and strictness are extremely important for writing large complex programs, and Haskell deliberately makes both of these things inconvenient. That's funny, because I'd say that immutability is essential for writing large on complex programs. Strictness, on the other hand, hmm, I can take it or leave it. > Haskell's ecosystem and tooling is still crappy No argument here. > because wri…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by tome »

angerman wrote: post #4

Having 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.

I agree. Thanks to everyone contributing ideas!

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

#73

Post by sid-kap »

bojo wrote: post #20
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.

Check out Hayoo (http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/) -- I like it more than Hoogle

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

#74

Post by guard-of-terra »

darksaints wrote: post #57

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 teammat…

In my opinion, Haskell community was very warm and helpful, and also able to admit shortcomings.

This was before Stack Overflow reshaped the landscape. On Freenode, ##java was a pretty hostile place (having to deal with people asking to do homework for them or being overall clueless) with attitude "if you see a problem with Java, the problem is you". The culture was so toxic that "forces of evil" ended up stealing the channel from under its original founder and banning him.

On #haskell, you would be immersed in polite chat revealing the development in all things FP, plus even pretty stupid questions were answered in such way that they enlightened both the asking person and bywatchers.

Also they had quite a few awesome bots that let anyone practically develop directly in IRC.

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

#75

Post by skybrian »

tome wrote: post #69
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 don't like having to learn all that by heart before I even start with the language I'm very curious about this. Why do you think you have to learn it all by heart before you start with the language?

I'd guess this happens when you don't know an easy way to look up the definitions on the fly.

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

#76

Post by eveningcoffee »

virmundi wrote: post #36

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.

Well, you can argue that you at the given moment are not the same you a moment ago.

You can perceive yourself moment ago exactly because of that.

Others who have not seen you recently hold the old reference to you.

I would rather say that the world is naturally immutable.

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

#77

Post by js8 »

darksaints wrote: post #57

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 teammat…

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

I am actually wondering about that. It is considered essential by the classic paper "Why functional programming matters", for better program composition.

In particular, I wonder how are you supposed to pass around IO monad (or any other thing whose evaluation will give you side effects) as a value, if you have strict evaluation. I thought the whole point of Haskell was to lazily create a "recipe" as an IO monad, which will then be evaluated after it is returned from function main. In particular, I wonder how Idris deals with this problem, as I read it has strict evaluation.

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

#78

Post by tinco »

johan_larson wrote: post #47

Haskell sucks because you can't really get anywhere before understanding monads well, and monads are (take your pick) a) too hard for most programmers, or b) too distant from the abstractions used in most programming languages. Not that's you're done mastering Haskell when you've figured out monads, of course. There are plenty of harder abstractions running around. But monads are the orgo of Haskell, the place many e…

I don't feel at all that this is true. It is not necessary to understand monads to get good work done in Haskell for basically any purpose. Authoring monads is something usually left to library authors, and for basic users it's just a nifty interface that lets you do handy things in imperative style haskell ('do' syntax).

I don't want to be defensive in this thread, since obviously getting real about deficiencies in Haskell is a great way of making a path for positive change, but the spreading of the idea that monads are magical and hard is dangerous.

It's similar to how back in the day Java and PHP developers dismissed Ruby on Rails for being magical and hard to understand with weird syntax. The truth is that Ruby on Rails was very easy to use regardless of its rather complex innards, and once you get a good handle on Ruby, even the Rails innards weren't all that difficult to understand and extend.

The hard part of learning Haskell is getting to grips with functional style programming and understanding the power of its type system. Learning that is rewarding and has a low entry-barrier, it's even something I'd recommend to someone who has never programmed before. Don't worry about monads.

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

tome wrote: post #69
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 don't like having to learn all that by heart before I even start with the language I'm very curious about this. Why do you think you have to learn it all by heart before you start with the language?

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by dllthomas »

revelation wrote: post #45
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…

Of course they do. The point here is exactly that all of those things apply to Haskell, simultaneously.

And yet, most of us posting these things still choose Haskell.
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