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I tried Haskell for 5 years

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Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#51

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#52

Post by platz »

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…

> Is there an application sweet spot/domain

State of the Haskell ecosystem: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md

    The topics are roughly sorted from greatest strengths to greatest weaknesses. 
    Each programming area will also be summarized by a single rating of either:

    Best in class: the best experience in any language
    Mature: suitable for most programmers
    Immature: only acceptable for early-adopters
    Bad: pretty unusable

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#53

Post by vog »

haskellandchill wrote: post #47
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…

Production use cases pushed me towards Haskell. What elegance there is serves towards reasoning about the correctness of complex code, however the tradeoff is difficulty in reasoning about performance. You can still get great performance! And I use it for prototyping in the Type-Driven Development style. Strongly disagree with "if it compiles it is correct" but we have great tools like Doctest and QuickCheck for that…

> reasoning about the correctness of complex code, however the tradeoff is difficulty in reasoning about performance

That's what drove me to languages like OCaml and Rust, which try to solve this tradeoff in a different way: Same thing about strictness and correctnes (despite slight differences in the type system), but lazy evaluation is only provided when explicitly asked for.

The cool thing about OCaml is that you can actually reason about performance, as long as you ignore memory issues (memory usage, garbage collector runs, etc.). Rust is heavily inspired by OCaml and allows you to also reason about correctness and performance of memory usage.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#54

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

kepano wrote: post #48
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…

We use Haskell in production at lumi.com for our backend/API. We've found it very productive and easy to maintain.

React, HapiJS, RethinkDB, Node and Haskell. That might be the coolest stack ever. Do you have any FOSS project on Github?

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#55

Post by platz »

gjkood wrote: post #44
moomin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Application sweet spot is a funny thing, because it's mostly determined by the presence of specific libraries. What Haskell has more than anything is ridiculously general libraries. It's got perfectly good libraries for web development, Postgres access &access, but the only place I'd say it's got a real application-specific strength in libraries is parsing. Weirdly, what Haskell is good at is generality. Which is muc…

Ok, so the generality like LISP/Scheme with a few basic productions/rules and some basic operations could be used to create/represent any levels of complexity. Something like Northhead & Russell's Principia Mathematica.

I think painting Haskell as a LISP but in a blank-slate world without packages is not quite accurate. There is a large library of existing packages that take you beyond the language's primitive constructions.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#56

Post by draw_down »

ashark wrote: post #37
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.

Yeah, reading that shit drives me nuts.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#57

Post by moomin »

gjkood wrote: post #44
moomin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Application sweet spot is a funny thing, because it's mostly determined by the presence of specific libraries. What Haskell has more than anything is ridiculously general libraries. It's got perfectly good libraries for web development, Postgres access &access, but the only place I'd say it's got a real application-specific strength in libraries is parsing. Weirdly, what Haskell is good at is generality. Which is muc…

Ok, so the generality like LISP/Scheme with a few basic productions/rules and some basic operations could be used to create/represent any levels of complexity. Something like Northhead & Russell's Principia Mathematica.

Yes, and that's why you're often scratching your head at the function definitions: they're extremely general solutions to general problems. This, in conjunction with the documentation issue means that often you end up getting referred to papers, which does nothing to help the "only for academics" impression.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#58

Post by platz »

moomin wrote: post #57
gjkood wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so the generality like LISP/Scheme with a few basic productions/rules and some basic operations could be used to create/represent any levels of complexity. Something like Northhead & Russell's Principia Mathematica.

Yes, and that's why you're often scratching your head at the function definitions: they're extremely general solutions to general problems. This, in conjunction with the documentation issue means that often you end up getting referred to papers, which does nothing to help the "only for academics" impression.

It is a fair point that some libraries could benefit from some better soft documentation.

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#59

Post by _ar7 »

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.

Was it https://fugue.co ? I think they use Haskell for their DSL

Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years

#60

Post by Veratyr »

crogre wrote: post #45
Veratyr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article you're looking for is http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr1049.pdf - Two of the top three (out of ten) solutions were made in Haskell, one by a beginner.

Yep, that's the one! Looks like there were lots of problems with the experiment but good to read regardless.
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