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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)

#241

Post by solidsnack9000 »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #4

Pulling no punches: Other than that, I will probably never choose to use Go for anything ever again, unless I’m being paid for it. Go is just too different to how I think: when I approach a programming problem, I first think about the types and abstractions that will be useful; I think about statically enforcing behaviour; and I don’t worry about the cost of intermediary data structures, because that price is almost…

The cost profile for data structures is different in Go, though, since it tries to stack allocate very aggressively. GHC, like Java and many other classical GC'd languages, tends toward heap allocation.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #4

Pulling no punches: Other than that, I will probably never choose to use Go for anything ever again, unless I’m being paid for it. Go is just too different to how I think: when I approach a programming problem, I first think about the types and abstractions that will be useful; I think about statically enforcing behaviour; and I don’t worry about the cost of intermediary data structures, because that price is almost…

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by ruslan_talpa »

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #203
peatmoss wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

And since GraphQL is all the rage now, I'm using PostgREST here https://graphqlapi.com/ so i would say Haskell is picking up steam in terms of user facing products

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

#244

Post by munchhausen »

theoh wrote: post #193
shmageggy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head, Pandoc, a tool for converting between different markup/down flavors, and xmonad, a tiling window manager for linux. Both are well known and popular.

Is there anything actually interesting about what they do, though? Converting markup is not a complex task.

Grandparent sold pandoc short. It is actually a really nifty utility capable of converting a plethora of formats from/to each other. It is a godsend for situations when you have to create MS Office-compatible documents, and want to avoid the inevitable muscle cramps you'd get if you were to actually use Word.

You can create your own document templates, and tweak the resulting output in a million ways. At my job, I have to create a lot of documentation, often in PDF or docx, and Pandoc has become an integral part of my workflow. I can create documents within the comfortable environment of Emacs, and use Pandoc to produce output in any old format that $pointy_haired_boss may desire.

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

#245

Post by wyager »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
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 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…

Others have mentioned excellent software like pandoc and xmonad. There are also projects with a smaller target audience, but that are insanely impressive compared to what you could plausibly do in basically any other language. In particular, I've used Clash and Lambda-CCC, which let you compile Haskell code to VHDL or Verilog and put it on an FPGA.

I think the number of useful tools is pretty closely correlated to popularity, and obviously Haskell has a relatively small user base. It's not like Haskell gives you super-powers and makes you 10x more productive; it mostly lets you write better software, not necessarily more software. I do feel more productive with Haskell, but it's on the order of 50-100% (depending on the task), not enough to let Haskellers match the open-source output of a very popular language like C.

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

#246

Post by cube2222 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #231
cube2222 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like implicit interfaces, it's the feature I love the most actually?

I like it as well although I can see there would be times when you might want to be explicit.

I understand, but why would it be the greatest issue to despise, I'm just curious.

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

#247

Post by stewbrew »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
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 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…

While I think you're doing injustice to the haskell community, I think it's quite interesting that I personally quite frequently stumble over relevant tools that are written in go -- e.g. syncthing. The only haskell-based app I use is pandoc (which is old) after my ruby-based (and even older) converter of choice got abandoned.

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

#248

Post by zumu »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
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 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…

Not OSS, but I know Galois use a lot of haskell in their work for largely government agencies (NASA, DoD, etc.)

Perhaps the type of problems Haskell is apt to solve (those requiring strict correctness, etc.) are not typically open source software projects.

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

#249

Post by wyager »

demarq wrote: post #2

I hate to sound like the rust evangelist strike force... I really do. But your complaints are exactly what it would solve... Sigh I hate to say this I really do. But here goes... So have you checked out rust?

Most haskellers are fond of Rust. However, it is certainly not a Haskell replacement; it has substantially less expressive power. This is, arguably, necessary for its impressive memory model (no GC and memory safe allocation), but it does hurt programmer productivity in many cases. I always feel constrained when I use Rust, although I can't fault the language for being that way. Rust is well-designed, but even good designs come with caveats. I prefer Haskell's caveats for most common programming tasks.

Personally, as a frequent Haskell user, I'm looking forward to replacing embedded C/C++ with Rust as soon as they get the AVR toolchain figured out and there's better support for common ARM uCs.

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

#250

Post by im_down_w_otp »

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 experience this depression constantly. It's very rare to find people or places using Erlang, the community is extremely small and seemingly getting smaller all the time, and new things attempting to approximate its core strengths (often badly or incompletely) keep coming to the market and only further exacerbating the situation.

So I end up stuck working with crappier tech, crappier tools, and dealing with the effects of fewer and fewer resources going into improving the last 5% of annoying things about Erlang. While a deluge of resources go into partially reinventing the first 50% of it over and over again in some other random language.

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