121–130 of 154 posts
> I would not be surprised if Haskell were 100x better than Java for writing compilers. The author sounds like someone who has glimpsed at the truth, but is only willing to take miniscule baby-steps away from their mistaken position. Think about what it means to say Haskell is 100x better than Java for writing compilers. If you really believe this, quit your job and spend a year writing a Graal competitor in Haskell.…
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…
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.
To favor 1969-1975's engineering, you mean.
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 .…
If you want your language to be used by working software engineers, that's a different metric of success. But then, you'd do things differently if that was your goal.
Haskell, in achieving some real-world use, has achieved beyond the wildest dreams of a research language.
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…
I don't think any CS education teaches language ecosystems. Students learn them on their own for whatever language they want. The choice they make is probably much more influenced by the popularity of the language or a job market, but not in which language they have to do all those tiny mostly algorithmic assignments.
It doesn't look like unison.cloud is aiming to replace the web as an end-user application platform, though. What would a pure functional platform look like? More like Datomic, I think, and maybe then I wouldn't run into 404s so much.
i have railed/ranted (occasionally belligerently) about haskell after having a professional brush with it two years ago. haskell hasn't taken over the world because the community is haughty about haskell's giant warts. yes it's very welcoming and open to indoctrinating you on "best practices" but as soon as you diverge in the slightest (because someone before you diverged or because you need to do something unconvent…
Have you ever heared of C language? It is much worse:
If 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…
> ...introducing all kinds of weirdness I don't want to have in a business context. Despite being a Haskell worshiper, I strongly agree with this.
Given the number of people who have learned the language there is really not much written in haskell that is used for something that isn't programming a computer.
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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…
I personally believe almost the opposite. Even when I write Python, I use classes sparingly and if I ever choose to get a lower back tattoo it would probably say “Inheritance Sucks” in Chinese or something. Think of a constructor function for a class. It is so easy to shove new complexity in there. Just add new optional arguments, assign them as instance attributes, and off you go. If you have a class like MonthlyRep…