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.
Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
101–110 of 208 posts
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#102Haskell, 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.
The problem I see here is just the unsolved computer science problem of how to reduce the complicated, drawn-out, and error-prone job of a C programmer into the succinct job of a functional programmer without fundamentally pretending modern computers work in a way they don't.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#103Haskell, 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?
#104Pros: The compiler eliminates a lot of potential bugs, so once my code compiles, I've saved hours that would have been spent debugging if I were using, say, C++.
However,
Cons: It takes more hours to figure out why my code is not compiling!
Basically, instead of debugging my code, now I have to "debug" GHC, trying to figure out what it is thinking and why it's rejecting my code.
Put another way, C++ allows me to try "quick and dirty" solutions first, and then later iterate and improve. Haskell requires me to be perfect at first try.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#105Haskell 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…
This would be a reasonable critique except that monads are really why Haskell ends up being so powerful and composable. Sure, they can be tough to wrap your head around, but without them Haskell wouldn't be particularly special or useful.
See http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2015/08/07/scoped-continuati...
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#106Haskell, 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.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
https://www.fpcomplete.com/hoogle
It searches on all the stackage set of packages, afaik (another explanation: http://stackoverflow.com/a/21955591/293735 )
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#108And, along the lines of the syntax, the culture of style in Haskell. Single letter variables abound. Not just throwaway vars where the meaning is pretty clear from context. Entire libraries written with only single letter or acronymic variable names. Good luck understanding what a library author was trying to do by reading their code. I think this culture problem is largely being driven by the fact (which I mentioned) that Haskell's base syntax is already very opaque. I understand that the language takes some cues from the mathematical community (not surprising given its history). However, the language needs to ditch this to gain broader acceptance.
And, again, leading into my next point: the culture of the community in general is too academic. I'll make another comparison with Python. The Python community, among scripting languages, leans more toward the academic side but in a good way. They've found a nice balance. It's easy to get started and, if you want to learn more about the details, you can do so. With Haskell, you immediately get hung up on the details. Most of the details have to do with how Haskell fits into the framework of category theory. However, most programmers don't give a shit about provability. They just want to write software that is faster, safer, and more concise without being terse. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to have this in a functional language with the same goals as Haskell. Beginners should be able to get started quickly and without much confusion. If they're curious about the underlying principles, they should be able to gradually peel back the layers and learn more.
Re: Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?
#109Haskell 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 th…