261–270 of 369 posts
The problem is, the children did do it, skipped going to school to learn the basics, and now we see clearly reflected in the evolution of the ecosystem their efforts to slowly re-discover and re-invent everything.
I don't think anyone benefits from watering down the definition of "good" to the point where it describes Javascript. Javascript – sorry, modern Javascript – sorry, surfing a compile-to-JS liferaft atop a thick and constantly shifting foam of tooling and libraries disgorged by literal person-millennia of community effort – can be surprisingly decent if you're careful. Any meaningful definition of good has to draw a l…
Brilliant.
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I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.
The one thing that makes Haskell not great is that its understanding is not widely intuitive. People with mathy backgrounds that don't blink at the phrase "lambda calculus" won't consider this, but a lot of people struggle with math. If you can't put it in the hands of a 6th grader (in the public school system with no special tutoring) and have a reasonable chance of it being understood (n.b. I self-taught myself ear…
Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with a syntax inspired by C, wildly different syntaxes learned at a later stage are more difficult to them", which is a more reasonable proposition. This could be fixed by teaching programmers other languages early on.
Haskell is no more or less intuitive than JavaScript. It's just different.
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While I use Python for ML myself, I find it weird to say that a language isn't slow because you don't really use it anyway. It's true that Scripts in Python can be fast if 99% of the executed logic is in C anyway but that doesn't mean the language isn't slow. As soon as your Python script needs to do anything not available in a library you'll notice how slow it really is. Python is really neat to quickly experiment p…
As parent mentioned, python!=cpython. You've got pypy, cython, typed cython, nuitka, and probably some others I forgot about. Without knowing what you're trying to achieve and what you've tried, "extremely slow" is pretty hard to accept.
Code spends most of its time being in production and not in development. During that time in production, developers will leave the team, bugs will show up, major enhancements will be made. So it is important that the codebase is easy to reason about, easy to refactor and easy to debug. If you take a language like Java and an IDE like Eclipse or Intellij IDEA, it is trivial to find from where a particular piece of cod…
If the issue is IDEs you can do all that with WebStorm. As a matter of fact, you can even use IntelliJ for checking function usages and refactoring in JavaScript.
Yes, modern IDE do wonderful thing to help you with JS but they will never be able to match the help they can give with a language that is statically typed.
Code spends most of its time being in production and not in development. During that time in production, developers will leave the team, bugs will show up, major enhancements will be made. So it is important that the codebase is easy to reason about, easy to refactor and easy to debug. If you take a language like Java and an IDE like Eclipse or Intellij IDEA, it is trivial to find from where a particular piece of cod…
You can always cherrypick advantages and disadvantages to make a language look "bad", or make another language look "better".
For disadvantages, how serious are they, how easy are they to be abused, to creep into the codebase, to be prevented from happening again, etc.
It also depends on the team. If it is a small team of 5 people and they are all excellent engineers, I think whatever languages are fine. The 5 engineers will discuss and decide what features to NOT use, etc. and abide to them. If it is a team of 500 engineers, it will take much more efforts and eductions and much longer to achieve that.
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I like to think of Haskell as a great language. It still has its warts (e.g. last [0,1/3..2] > 2), but if you wan't wart free, there's probably nothing beyond lambda calculus. Being the closest thing to lambda calculus with enough syntactic sugar on top to make it practical is a large part of what makes Haskell great.
Haskell was the first thing that came to mind. I can show with one hand, by joining my pointer-finger and thumb, the number of people I know that use it. It looks lovely, and it's something I'd very much like to learn some day but I can't for the life of me think of what I would use it for. Are there any killer apps out there for it? At least with lisp, I can configure emacs ...
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While I use Python for ML myself, I find it weird to say that a language isn't slow because you don't really use it anyway. It's true that Scripts in Python can be fast if 99% of the executed logic is in C anyway but that doesn't mean the language isn't slow. As soon as your Python script needs to do anything not available in a library you'll notice how slow it really is. Python is really neat to quickly experiment p…
That python is slow is utterly irrelevant. You would never deploy an unoptimized Python codebase into production if you cared about performance. You would profile the code and optimize the hot paths with the appropriate technology, be it numba-jit, cython, numpy, cffi, or any of the other many ways you can easily optimize Python
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Pandoc and Xmonad are written in Haskell.
Interesting but again, short of contributing to these projects what am I going to do with Haskell?
You could start your own project. You could contribute to an existing project. You could evangelize Haskell at your job, if possible.
All of these are hard, of course. It'll be easier to use a more mainstream language. But if Haskell strikes your fancy, maybe it's worth the effort?
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The one thing that makes Haskell not great is that its understanding is not widely intuitive. People with mathy backgrounds that don't blink at the phrase "lambda calculus" won't consider this, but a lot of people struggle with math. If you can't put it in the hands of a 6th grader (in the public school system with no special tutoring) and have a reasonable chance of it being understood (n.b. I self-taught myself ear…
This is the one criticism of Haskell that in my opinion has no merit. Programming languages are not intuitive. They are a learned skill. You know the saying (sometimes said as a joke) "such-and-such language failed because it didn't have C-like syntax" -- but C-like syntax is NOT intuitive! Reading C code is a learned skill. Maybe it could be amended to "since many programmers learned to program using languages with…
I can teach someone Python or JavaScript in a few weeks, at a casual pace, where they can accept input from STDIN or a file, do some calculations, and produce output to STDOUT or another file.
Haskell? I'd need a dedicated fucking thesaurus on-hand for them to grok the paradigm, and it would take a few months before they could achieve the same result.
I have another point here:
If the only languages that are considered great are the ones that make people feel smarter than everyone else for being able to understand, we don't need great languages.
Most of us need easy, practical languages that help us solve problems and don't get in our way. (Most of achieving this property comes down to ecosystem rather than language design.)