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

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

#91

Post by denim_chicken » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

Well, I can't say much other than that I encourage everyone to try Haskell for themselves and form their own opinion -- if they can find the time to get over the language's extremely steep learning curve.

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

#92

Post by T-R » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

Lazy IO's an issue, but Lazy Evaluation? It's not that different from writing SQL, and the places where it is, it's a lot more consistent, predictable, and tuneable. It's usually just bad defaults like Lazy IO, or String instead of Text that get you, but there's some consensus to move away from that.

There are definitely some toxic assholes, as in any community, and it's really shitty if they're going to, e.g., /r/java and harassing people. I feel pretty strongly that the opposite is a more common problem, though, particularly on HN: the anti-intellectualism against functional programmers, and Haskell users in particular, is rampant and gets pretty offensive. Example off the top of my head - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527745 - article simply explaining a math concept gets, as what was the top comment at the time, a condescending comment calling it all "mental masturbation". I've stopped reading HN so much because it's pretty clear that people trying to learn abstract algebra and apply it to code aren't welcome here.

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

#93

Post by malisper » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

My reason is that there are eight different folding functions:

foldl, foldr, foldl1, foldr1, foldl', foldr', foldl1', and foldr1'.

There are twelve if you count:

scanl, scanr, scanl1, scanr1.

Also, the implementation of monad transformers is disgusting. It requires O(n^2) code generation where n is the number of monads.

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

#94

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

iopq wrote: post #55

pjmlp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And spend time tracking down memory corruption?

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

No, but it has compiler assisted resource management. Not the first idea that comes to mind when someone complaints about GC.

Besides even on Rust, using lock free algorithms without GC help is very tricky.

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

#95

Post by neutronicus » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:55 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…

As a counterpoint, I love this about Haskell.

It seems like my ability to hold logic in my head is partly visuo-spatial, and the terseness makes it easier for me to tell what's going on. (I also do Scientific Computing, so a general resemblance to mathematical notation is hugely helpful for me reading code).

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

#96

Post by PeCaN » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

olavk wrote: post #87

Haskell, like Perl, is optimized towards writing code rather than reading code. I would like a language which is to Haskell what Python is to Perl.

How about OCaml? It's not as theoretically advanced as Haskell, but it gets work done, is easy to read, fast, easy to reason about the complexity of, has decent libraries, and is generally quite pleasant.

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

#97

Post by oldmanmike » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #88

oldmanmike wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> My main gripe with lazy evaluation is that it's implicit behavior. It's to evaluation what garbage collection is to memory Are you saying you would like to return to the languages with explicit memory management? Or why is, generally speaking, GC considered good and LE considered bad?

> Are you saying you would like to return to the languages with explicit memory management?

Not really, but that does seem to be the logical conclusion at the end of the day. Haskell makes a really good case for the use of a garbage collector via pure functional programming, but I'm open to more fine-grain programmer-driven mechanisms for handling memory. I need to try out Rust's borrowing system on a meaningfully large project before I can start saying anything conclusive.

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

#98

Post by webnrrd2k » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #34

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.…

Also, read as: "add one and two"

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

#99

Post by neutronicus » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #83

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." It seems to me that there is some connection/analogy with garbage collection. Garbage collection also makes reasoning about space usage of progr…

It's really easy to fuck up what will be evaluated, when, and wind up with disastrous performance ramifications.

As an example, I wanted to accumulate a list of summary data as I iterated through a recursive function. Through a coding error, the elements of the list (although not the list itself) were not evaluated until all the iterations were complete. This meant that, instead of a list of structs, which I thought I had, I had a list of zero-argument functions that, when called, would yield structs, _each of which contained a reference to a large array computed at an earlier iteration of the computation_.

So, I hemorrhaged space. This was a fuck-up, not a missed optimization.

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

#100

Post by whateveracct » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

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…

Understanding monads sufficiently to work in monadic production code requires two things:

- Learning the type signatures of all the primitives of the Functor/Applicative/Monad hierarchy.

- Seeing some common monadic types in action. Basically understand how to interpret the "context" of M[A] and the semantics of bind. So Option[A] is a potentially missing A and bind short circuits. Writer[W, A] is an A with some accumulated W and bind accumulates the W. IO[A] is a description of an IO action that, when run, will yield an A and bind will create a new IO action that will use the result to produce a new IO action.