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I tried Haskell for 5 years

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Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#31

Post by vadman »

davidrm wrote: post #5

This has been the most disappointing blog post I have read in quite some time.

Why? The author didn't crap nor fawn all over the language. He highlighted what he thought were important quirks of the Haskell ecosystem/community/whatever, in a measured manner, while noting that if you invest time and effort you can indeed produce relevant output.

Should one dive in given those quirks? The decision is up to the reader.

Curious, what did you expect/wish for?

EDITED for better phrasing.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#32

Post by nijaru »

choxi wrote: post #8

If anyone's curious to try out functional programming, I would highly recommend Elm. I haven't been so excited about a language since I went from C to Ruby ten years ago, and Pragmatic Studios has a great course on it (I have no affiliation): https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/elm

And Elm is implemented in Haskell ;]

I've been meaning to try Elm since I've been playing around with Haskell more and more. Purescript is relatively similar but allows you to build more than frontends. It seems Elm has grown quite a lot in popularity though.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#33

Post by BoiledCabbage »

hvs wrote: post #26
hzhou321 wrote: post #13

> 1. There is a learning curve. Time and experience can cover up anything. So this does not say much about Haskell other than it is all negative without time and experience. > 2. Haskell has some very nice libraries So does NodeJS and (on an abstract level) Microsoft Word. Libraries are infrastructures and investments that (like time and experience) can cover up any shortcomings. > 3. Haskell libraries are sometimes…

Every time I've tried to dedicate time to really learning Haskell, I've come away with the feeling, "If I was a lot smarter or had a lot more time to dedicate to it, this would be a fantastic language to develop in after about 2-3 years." The way that functions can compose in the hands of a gifted developer is truly elegant. That said, I'm not sure it's a skill that translates well to the general development communit…

Out of curiosity, what method/resource did you use to try to learn it?

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#34

Post by agumonkey »

gjkood wrote: post #16

Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…

I just saw a haskell meetup where they're using haskell for devops. Basically static typing the underlying machine configurations. As usual, being an Haskell code, the abstraction is generalized and you can apply the logic on other domains.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#35

Post by gjkood »

Veratyr wrote: post #28
gjkood wrote: post #16

Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…

I think I can safely say it isn't used heavily in many production environments but it is used heavily in some. For example, one of Facebook's abuse systems, dealing with 1M requests per second is written in Haskell: https://code.facebook.com/posts/745068642270222/fighting-spa... As for particular places where it shines, I don't know of any in particular. I remember when taking my Declarative Programming course in uni…

Ok, so the Facebook example definitely falls under a contemporary heavy production usage system. Thanks.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#36

Post by dllthomas »

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #29
m-j-fox wrote: post #12

> very hard to understand why a function could be useful in the first place So true. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.1.0/docs/Contro... > mfix :: (a -> m a) -> m a > The fixed point of a monadic computation. mfix f executes the action f only once, with the eventual output fed back as the input. Hence f should not be strict, for then mfix f would diverge. But why tho?

By analogy to fix: fix f --> f (fix f) That is, to compute the fixed point of some function f, we give f access to the fixed point (i.e. fix f) in order to compute the fixed point. Consider f is strict, and that we try to run this: fix f --> f (fix f) --> f (f (fix f)) --> f (f (f (...))) Why? Because if f is strict it has to evaluate its argument before evaluating the body. On the other hand, if f is non-strict, we…

I think you answered the wrong "why".

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#37

Post by ashark »

m-j-fox wrote: post #12

> very hard to understand why a function could be useful in the first place So true. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.1.0/docs/Contro... > mfix :: (a -> m a) -> m a > The fixed point of a monadic computation. mfix f executes the action f only once, with the eventual output fed back as the input. Hence f should not be strict, for then mfix f would diverge. But why tho?

Ubiquitous single-letter symbols mapping to who-knows-what possible things, pnflly abvted fncn nms, and unclear motivations for code are what I've bounced off of with Haskell every time I've tried to dig in. The community seems to have adopted all the worst parts of mathematics culture, along with whichever good parts they've brought in.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#38

Post by tonyedgecombe »

agumonkey wrote: post #34
gjkood wrote: post #16

Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…

I just saw a haskell meetup where they're using haskell for devops. Basically static typing the underlying machine configurations. As usual, being an Haskell code, the abstraction is generalized and you can apply the logic on other domains.

https://propellor.branchable.com/ I would guess.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#39

Post by scardine »

gjkood wrote: post #16

Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…

Haskell primary concern is correctness - there is an autistic-level obsession with it. If your algorithm is right the Haskell implementation is probably right.

This is why it is not very practical for me, most of the time my problem is getting to the right formula in a timely fashion - implementation is the easy part.

Like the OP I use Python when I'm concerned about pragmatism.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#40

Post by embwbam »

gjkood wrote: post #16

Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…

I've been playing with it for about 5 years, started the local Haskell meetup, etc. I used it on a side project that reached beta in 2015, and on a startup at the beginning of 2016. Starting at the end of 2016 I started using it on a big contract. I had to convince the client it was a good idea, but they've been convinced by my team's productivity. All of the above were back end web services. The current project is a bunch of systems to underwrite and issue loans and involves an ML calculation (hosted on data robot).

I love it for general back end web development. I can actually solve problems so they stay solved.

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