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Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

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Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#201

Post by sfifs »

jwdunne wrote: post #8

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines. If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of dep…

I find that I end up picking the excellent language engineering that is in Go almost any day over languages with many features that simply don't work well together.

Just the other day I was struggling with the hopeless nightmare of Java's lack of true first class functions (but still having some first class function like semantics) combined with embedded classes restrictions combined with generics thrown in for good measure (AsyncTask embedding in an activity and updating result in the activity).

Go features are clearly specified in a very readable and fairly concise spec and guide and its features fit seamlessly together virtually every time​

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#202

Post by rbehrends »

_0w8t wrote: post #31

The author mentioned that code generation "introduces additional, non-standart syntax". One can say exactly the same about generics. Most useful typesystems with generics are Turing-complete. Essentially they introduce own language for types with often very weired rules and syntax that one has to master on top of the basic language. With code generation I can program my types using the same language I use for code wi…

> Most useful typesystems with generics are Turing-complete.

The easy solution for that is to put parametric polymorphism in the module language, not the type system. ML, Ada, Modula-3 all did it successfully.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#203

Post by ruslan_talpa »

peatmoss wrote: post #198
seagreen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the others mentioned, PostgREST: https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest

Any high-profile users of this that I might have heard of? Because on first look, PostgREST looks kind of... amazing.

Depends on what you mean by high profile. I would not say there are high profile projects but that's only because it's quite a new project. The latest version which imo is the first one to be a truly powerful one is only a month old. But there are people using in production for close to a year now.

Oh, and i've seen someone on HN saying it's used in something like the upcoming Kosovo land property tax system or something like that but i am not directly aware of that.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#204

Post by daxfohl »

Haskell always makes me sad. In real-world apps you always need hacks. I do anyway. In an imperative language I can be proud when my code only has a couple hacks in it. With Haskell I just end up feeling nasty about my code if there's even one hack there, and it makes me like coding less. (For toy apps with no deadline Haskell is great; the above regards Haskell-at-work, as a freelancer).

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#205

Post by yxhuvud »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #7

TL;DR: "Go isn't like Haskell, and that means it's not as good" I get that we all have favourite languages, but it is not amazingly helpful to try and compare them like this, for me. I'm sure if you're a Haskeller and you're eyeing up Go, being forewarned might be helpful, but here's another idea: Don't compare. Just use. Take it at face value. Figure out what becomes easy, what becomes hard. I came at Go from 10+ ye…

I guess you have looked at Crystal then? Much of the same expressibilty and stdlib as Ruby, but natively compiled and with channels.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#206

Post by bad_user »

pmarreck wrote: post #170
bad_user wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot speak for Elixir, but coming from the Erlang world, I'm sure it's a fine language that has sane defaults, much like Clojure. However I switched from Python to Scala and besides the performance issues and the poor handling of async I/O that I had with Python, by far the biggest problem with Python was all the insecurity while developing with it. It drove me insane, because we had a production system that alwa…

Scala, where code you've written 6 months ago really does look like hieroglyphics to you or to anyone else right now who doesn't know Scala intimately ;) I would agree that the Elixir community is currently very homogeneous and therefore very pleasant. To some extent, that is true of many new langs and their early communities. I disagree that this is a premature strike against it. I say enjoy it (and work within it)…

Not sure why the wink is there :-) but the Scala codebase I'm working on is 3 years old already and it is the cleanest codebase I've ever worked with. Maybe my experience is not representative of the whole ecosystem, I have certainly seen really messy Scala codebases in my ~5 years of experience with it, just like I have seen for other languages too.

However Scala is the perfect example for my opinion though - people perceive it as a TIMTOWTDI language, but that's because it got an influx of developers from other communities, the most representative IMO being Java, Ruby, Erlang and Haskell. After all, a determined Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell developer can continue to program Java/Ruby/Erlang/Haskell in any language, especially if that language is expressive enough to allow it.

Having such an influx gave rise to different opinions and mentalities of how to do things. Speaking of the web crowd, there's a big difference between Scalatra (see scalatra.org) which appeals to a Ruby crowd and relies on un-typed and unsafe APIs with baked in mutation, versus Http4s or Finch, which are very FP and typeful, versus Play Framework which takes a more balanced approach, being like a Rails framework (including the kitchen sink), but with sanity and types.

And the Scala community is actually on a convergence path right now, due to better books, tools and libraries. Which for me actually doesn't matter that much, because in Scala I can rely on the compiler such that my code is not so dependent on learning and applying best practices, when compared with other languages.

I was NOT saying that Elixir is pleasant because it is unpopular. I am saying that this might be a factor, that I suspect that in such instances the social aspect plays a larger role than we give it credit, especially when dynamic typing is involved, because with dynamic typing you rely on agreed upon best practices that the community must push forward, much more than static language proponents need to do. And personally I think that a language's technical merits should be judged after it gets popular enough to see an influx of developers with strong opinions from other languages.

E.g. in a static language a Maybe/Option value forces you to deal with the possibility of a value missing, whether you want to or not, being also useful as documentation that's always up to date. Whereas in a dynamic language you have to rely on documentation (poorly updated because it's the last thing that people update), soft community rules, taboos, etc in order to do the right thing.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#207

Post by platz »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #191
TheCondor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

Haskell is actually less expressive. It is a functional abstraction on top of what is essentially a procedural machine and with all abstractions placed on top of lower layers you can only lose functionality as you go up rather than gain. You could say assembly language is the most expressive language out there. The great thing about Haskell and other functional programming languages is that the functional style force…

> In haskell the application has to be an elegant diamond or the thing won't even compile!

Nonsense - You only have to make things as hard/elegant as you want them to be (and fore sure, some people do play that game for better/worse).

But, Haskell will happily allow you throw everything in to IO; you can side-step creating a perfect model and just hack together a list of imperative IO statements.

(unless you're referring to the difference between a dynlang and a static lang; that's a difference of another category altogether)

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#208

Post by cube2222 »

kuschku wrote: post #188
cube2222 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me, what do you mean by 'replace all stdlib datatypes with your own implementations'. Why would I do that?

To interface via an FFI with a game engine, which uses a custom allocator, and you need to pass datatypes between it and your own code? (As I’ve done in Java!) To replace existing implementations with your own, because you want a LinkedArrayList (a linked list of blocks)? Or because you want a TreeMap instead of a HashMap, or a Set with different implementation? Because you want to implement your own Either type to b…

This is an interesting point actually. Because it gets raised every time and I actually thought the same before starting with Go.

Thing is, in practice you usually don't need special generic containers. And when I actually need it, I'll just code up a non-generic implementation. When I need a complex type system I'll use Scala.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#209

Post by jwdunne »

willtim wrote: post #152
TheCondor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

I enjoy it so much I quit mainstream tech to do Haskell professionally 5 years ago.

That's really cool. What sort of problems do you work on? How did you manage to start working with it professionally?

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#210

Post by quchen »

daxfohl wrote: post #204

Haskell always makes me sad. In real-world apps you always need hacks. I do anyway. In an imperative language I can be proud when my code only has a couple hacks in it. With Haskell I just end up feeling nasty about my code if there's even one hack there, and it makes me like coding less. (For toy apps with no deadline Haskell is great; the above regards Haskell-at-work, as a freelancer).

For me it’s quite the opposite: Haskell allows me to have local hacky sections that I can then hide in a module that exposes a safe API. Since refactoring is fairly easy with compiler assistance, I don’t even have to break up my 100-line-long work-in-progress algorithm with temporary names until it works – and once I have a working solution, converting it to something readable is mostly manually extracting definitions and giving them useful names.
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