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If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

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Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#111

Post by danharaj »

wwwater wrote: post #109
danharaj wrote: post #51

I've done a 9-5 in mostly Haskell since 2013. If you have specific questions about using Haskell in production, I can share my experience. If you've had a bad experience with a piece of tech and draw a broad conclusion, I think it's reasonable if unfortunate that it left a bad taste in your mouth. But I also think there's a brighter picture to paint :)

I have a specific question: do you hire remotely? :)

Sometimes! We're not a remote-first company but we consider experienced candidates who live in a not too dissimilar time zone.

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#112

Post by wwwater »

danharaj wrote: post #111
wwwater wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a specific question: do you hire remotely? :)

Sometimes! We're not a remote-first company but we consider experienced candidates who live in a not too dissimilar time zone.

what's your timezone?

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#113

Post by buvanshak »

Animats wrote: post #57

The author notes the success of Go. Go's developers knew when to stop. Go is a mediocre language, but it has all the parts needed for server-side software. That's a big market. I suspect that part of the success of Go is simply because its libraries are heavily used. You know that the library is serving a zillion requests a second in Google data centers. Major bugs have probably been found by now. Go has one solidly…

>This gives you the immutability advantages of functional programming without the run-on sentence syntax...

What exactly do you mean by this? Have you looked into something like let expression in Haskell? You can define as many symbols as you would like with it that you can use in the evaluation of the final expression...

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#114

Post by greenhatman »

pitaj wrote: post #56
Smaug123 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Why the word "defect" though? There must be other words that are less controversial. Maybe "abnormalities" or "specialities"?

Because less controversial words would be less funny.

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#115

Post by buvanshak »

robotmay wrote: post #31

From my own experience, Haskell is hard to learn. I have no grounding in maths, but that hasn't stopped me learning most languages. It's a pretty massive barrier to Haskell though, and I find that a lot of the community really struggle to explain things in terms that non-haskellers will understand. The biggest problem I've found is a real inability to explain _why_ the things it does are cool, or what real-world appl…

> I just don't feel like Haskell fills that requirement..

About readability, Haskell in unreadable until you understand some basic precedence rules really well and until you internalize a hand full of things like function composition operator or the $ thing.

Then it becomes extremely readable.

Think of writing in shorthand [1]. For someone who does not know it, it looks quite cryptic. But once you internalize it, it becomes extremely concise and information dense.

So it is a case of a big initial investment and low long term/usage cost vs low initial investment and much higher usage cost.

So that, in a way answers the question raised by the post. Why hasn't Haskell taken over. It is because human beings are risk averse. ie we have preference for a sure outcome over a gamble with higher or equal expected value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#116

Post by majewsky »

hultner wrote: post #21
reikonomusha wrote: post #10

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. 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…

At my university (Chalmers University of Technology) Haskell is one of the first courses comp.sci students take to get introduced to programming. Haskell is immensely popular there with a lot of software engineering & comp.sci students

Same at my uni (Dresden University of Technology). The first two semesters have "Algorithms and Data Structures" where the first semester is taught in C (probably because students should have an unobstructed view to how data structures are laid out in memory and how algorithms traverse the pointers that make them up), but the second semester switches to Haskell.

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#117

Post by sras-me »

>>Writing CRUD apps? Haskell isn’t as much of a win.

If you are dealing with databases, having typed results from data base queries, and ability to define tables with custom typed columns (Opaleye library) can provide quite a lot of type safety....

That is just one example. If you are good with type level programming, it is possible that you will be able to find a way to encode the in variants of your business domain into the types and have the compiler assist you in building correct programs...

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#118

Post by addicted »

robotmay wrote: post #31

From my own experience, Haskell is hard to learn. I have no grounding in maths, but that hasn't stopped me learning most languages. It's a pretty massive barrier to Haskell though, and I find that a lot of the community really struggle to explain things in terms that non-haskellers will understand. The biggest problem I've found is a real inability to explain _why_ the things it does are cool, or what real-world appl…

One of the issues I think with learning Haskell concepts are that once you learn and understand a certain concept, it becomes obviously easy. At which point it becomes difficult to relate with someone who doesn’t yet understand that concept, and to whom what seems intutitively obvious to you seems insurmountably hard.

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#119

Post by splintercell »

dirkt wrote: post #105
tanilama wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, Go is designed for practicality. It shows design consideration to favor engineering while Haskell, as far as I can tell, barely cares.

Haskell actually doesn't care by conscious choice: It's meant as a research language, and has "avoided success at all costs" (to use the tongue-in-cheek quote) to retain the freedom to play around with things. Which in turn lead to quite a few inventions that are now being copied by other modern languages (like Rust), though they rename them to make them less scary (apparently programmers are easily scared by names .…

It's actually "avoid (success at all costs)", rather than "avoid success, at all costs".

Re: If Haskell is so great, why hasn't it taken over the world? (2017)

#120

Post by danharaj »

wwwater wrote: post #112
danharaj wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes! We're not a remote-first company but we consider experienced candidates who live in a not too dissimilar time zone.

what's your timezone?

New York, currently in EDT. We're not currently hiring at the moment but it's possible we'll post in the monthly who is hiring thread at some point in the future.
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