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Why does Haskell, in your opinion, suck?

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

#201

Post by nightski »

marcosdumay wrote: post #11
hacker_9 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this shows that the tooling is just as important, if not more important, when choosing a language. Good debugging tools are a must simply because things always go wrong, and if I don't have an IDE that can highlight the line for me and allow to mouse hover over variable values, then the whole experience becomes a lesson in frustration. Additionally if you expect me to 'write, build, run, repeat' just to test…

> if I don't have an IDE that can highlight the line for me and allow to mouse hover over variable values, then the whole experience becomes a lesson in frustration. What does that even mean in a language with no explicit model for code sequencing?

Well Haskell has a well defined execution order. I think the large problem is that compiled Haskell doesn't represent the original source at all making this tricky if not impossible.

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

#202

Post by njharman »

Peaker wrote: post #130
njharman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I enjoy both kinds of languages. I do think garbage collectors are overrated. When using certain styles in C or C++, memory management is really a tiny aspect you have to spend a tiny minority of your time thinking about -- but you gain so much determinism of execution in return. I've been burnt by garbage collection killing my programs' performance many times -- having to tune the garbage collector has taken more ti…

Deterministic! My usual coding projects (distributed, networked, multi-process/multi-thread) are so far from determinism and my problems so many levels above the concerns of C/C++.

Both are needed. Just saying I'm glad other devs work on the lower level stuff for me ;)

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

#203

Post by marcosdumay »

nightski wrote: post #201
marcosdumay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I don't have an IDE that can highlight the line for me and allow to mouse hover over variable values, then the whole experience becomes a lesson in frustration. What does that even mean in a language with no explicit model for code sequencing?

Well Haskell has a well defined execution order. I think the large problem is that compiled Haskell doesn't represent the original source at all making this tricky if not impossible.

The execution order is only defined on the IO monad or when there is data dependency. Independent chunks of pure code can be executed in any order.

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

#204

Post by Peaker »

njharman wrote: post #202
Peaker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy both kinds of languages. I do think garbage collectors are overrated. When using certain styles in C or C++, memory management is really a tiny aspect you have to spend a tiny minority of your time thinking about -- but you gain so much determinism of execution in return. I've been burnt by garbage collection killing my programs' performance many times -- having to tune the garbage collector has taken more ti…

Deterministic! My usual coding projects (distributed, networked, multi-process/multi-thread) are so far from determinism and my problems so many levels above the concerns of C/C++. Both are needed. Just saying I'm glad other devs work on the lower level stuff for me ;)

Non-determinism comes in many forms. I don't think it's an all or nothing thing.

Eliminating non-determinism is always nice, even if lots of other non-determinism remains.

Having predictable and understandable resource use is a nice plus. Removing dynamic memory allocation also tends to increase locality, remove indirections, and remove error handling paths from your code.

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

#205

Post by iopq »

pjmlp wrote: post #94
iopq wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's tricky even with a GC.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #203
nightski wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Haskell has a well defined execution order. I think the large problem is that compiled Haskell doesn't represent the original source at all making this tricky if not impossible.

The execution order is only defined on the IO monad or when there is data dependency. Independent chunks of pure code can be executed in any order.

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by nightski »

marcosdumay wrote: post #203
nightski wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Haskell has a well defined execution order. I think the large problem is that compiled Haskell doesn't represent the original source at all making this tricky if not impossible.

The execution order is only defined on the IO monad or when there is data dependency. Independent chunks of pure code can be executed in any order.

The key word being independent. There is still a natural baked in dependency ordering. That is all that I meant. I realize I could of phrased it better.

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

#208

Post by T-R »

striking wrote: post #141
T-R wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ja…

I don't think people mean to attack you, and it's really difficult for me to understand why the comment you linked could be considered offensive. I understand you have a certain love for Haskell, and that's a wonderful thing. But not everyone appreciates it as much as you do. One person's artful philosophy is another person's mental masturbation. And both people are entitled to their opinions. Perhaps you decided to…

The grandparent brought up the concept of a community problem where members from a community actively seek out and mock members of another, completely unprovoked. I won't argue whether members of the Haskell community do it or not - I haven't seen it, maybe I've just missed it, but it's terrible if they do. Whether you think it's a particularly good example or not, I'm merely pointing out that it happens a fair bit in the other direction here on HN, and the community either supports or turns a blind eye to it.

That's what's obnoxious about that comment - it's completely unprovoked trolling, and yet it was heavily upvoted. Of course the first reply disagrees with it - If I go to a thread about a Ruby library and insult people for wanting to use Ruby, you'd expect the top reply to disagree. What you'd hope not to see is for that trolling comment to be overwhelmingly upvoted to the top, and for the community to be making excuses as to why in this instance it's ok.

If someone's not interested in some content, or disagrees with it, that's one thing, but to actively find, mock, and seek community support in ostracizing people who are interested in learning it because of that interest - I'd argue that's anti-intellectual by definition. But whatever you want to call it, it's, as the grandparent comment stated, a community problem. Sadly for the author of that comment, the HN community excuses that sort of behavior - it's just different from the wonderful folks in whatever language community they're used to.

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