Because imperative languages require less optimization (hw wise) at first sight.
If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
41–50 of 154 posts
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#42If you look at software at various scales, Haskell does a lot to get the finely grained and maybe even medium grained parts right and correct. Yet, I don't see a convincing value proposition for Haskell for the coarser grained scales. On that level, the benefits of Haskell as a language dont shine anymore as brightly, and this is an area that many teams struggle with. And oh: Haskell's lazy evaluation is the reason w…
You'd be surprise how much weirder it gets when everything is evaluated eagerly.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#43Let's say you write the best image decoder library for the next great image format, and everyone wants it on every device that is connected to the internet. Writing it in haskell would mean that only haskell users, or people willing to link in a large runtime, could use it. So, you write it in C or Rust, so anyone can link it in and not care what it was written in. Maybe also write a native Java version, because that…
GHC can produce native libraries just like C or Rust.
But you have to link in the runtime, including the garbage collector.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#44It takes an insane amount of time to compile ghc. I can't stand apps that use it because of that. Could take hours on some machines, would have considered riding on that bandwagon if it wasn't for that limitation.
You can't compile GHC unless you already have a GHC, so why don't you just use the one you have?
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#45because the world is too short
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#46Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn. But when push comes to shove, your 9–5 career growth is probably going to be best optimized by cobbling a bunch of Python together and shipping it. Especially if you wr…
> Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn.
I find that it's because "Well-thought-out" means different things to different developers. To developers who are familiar with Haskell, well thought out means sound categorical mapping from program almost in a Hask-is-a-category way. To enterprise developers, well-thought-out means UML diagrams. To a grey beard, well thought out means fitting everything nicely into 256 bytes.
I'm exaggerating in every way of course, and yes, the more mathematically minded will see that they're quite essentially the same (UML, categories, and even some sort of goedelization).
More importantly I think it's because there are different ways of expressing "well-thought-out"ness that developers tend towards the things they are familiar with - unit tests are easy to understand. Hindley Milner not so much - I find from teaching, it requires that conceptual leap to making formal inductions.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#47> "Avoid success at all costs." > I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes too well known, or too widely used and too successful suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. Success is great, but it comes at a price. -- Simon P…
Did you just call JS-lovers and Haskell-lovers cognitively defective?
It's not an uncommon meme that programmers and mathematicians possess a weird twist in the mind that allows them [in the strong form of the meme] to do, and [in the weak form of the meme] to enjoy doing, what they do. If you grant that, then it's a small step to admitting the existence of different sub-twists that incline you towards different parts of the abstract space. If you don't grant that, then consider it a rhetorical device for pointing out that comparatively few people like Haskell versus JS.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#48Just an advice: read the article before writing a comment.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#49Part of this is that Haskell is seen as a language by and for academics. You can't even read about the history of Haskell because it is only published through the ACM for a steep fee. So unless you are part of the academic circle you won't be exposed to it unless you are ready to invest.
The biggest growth driver for Haskell is the financial world where it has seen quite a bit of adoption.
Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)
#50I spent a large amount of personal time becoming an intermediate Haskell developer from 2009-2015, culminating in landing a job doing exclusively functional programming for an analytics team in a large company. My experience made me give up on Haskell & functional programming entirel, despite my feeling that the principles of functional programming are often “better” than object orientation and other paradigms. The o…
Could I summarize your objection to Functional Programming in business setting as the fact that Object Orientation makes it simpler to model the businesses and thus easier to solve their problems?
If you think about a Function it does just one thing. But real world "agents" that run a business do many things. An OO-class has many methods, not just a single input and a single output.
And inheritance: Businesses differ from others incrementally. Inheritance is a way of modeling such incremental differences to a degree, explicitly. Even if inheritance is not perfect and can cause problems, it helps in many cases.