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Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

github.com

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Re: Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

#3

Post by jrockway »

> given Go's lack of exceptions, such a feature would be entirely impossible.

Haskell is a nice programming language, but ultimately if a program written in language A can run on your computer, a program can be written in language B that can run on your computer and do the same things.

If you think "return foo, err" is a lot different than return "Left foo" or "Right err", then you might want to think more about how you think about computer programs.

Re: Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

#4

Post by _bxg1 »

I'm really curious why Haskell has seen so little adoption in industry. Is it just the difficulty? Or a chicken-and-egg effect with tooling and libraries?

One thing I've wondered is if it actually isn't ideal for a lot of cases. FP is beautiful for certain things. But in some domains (or pieces of domains), state and mutation aren't just unfortunate implementation details, but a core element of the problem space. For these cases, the FP answer is usually "recompute and replace" (generally with immutable data structures that make this efficient). This can be syntactically clunky when it's a major part of your application, and not just a necessary evil to be swept out to the edge. The most successful languages let you be pure-functional where it makes sense and then stateful where it makes sense. Haskell doesn't, really (from my cursory reading about it).

Re: Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

#5

Post by [deleted] »

jrockway wrote: post #3

> given Go's lack of exceptions, such a feature would be entirely impossible. Haskell is a nice programming language, but ultimately if a program written in language A can run on your computer, a program can be written in language B that can run on your computer and do the same things. If you think "return foo, err" is a lot different than return "Left foo" or "Right err", then you might want to think more about how…

[deleted]

Re: Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

#6

Post by tathougies »

_bxg1 wrote: post #4

I'm really curious why Haskell has seen so little adoption in industry. Is it just the difficulty? Or a chicken-and-egg effect with tooling and libraries? One thing I've wondered is if it actually isn't ideal for a lot of cases. FP is beautiful for certain things. But in some domains (or pieces of domains), state and mutation aren't just unfortunate implementation details, but a core element of the problem space. For…

I havr never noticed immutable data structures to be more difficult to deal with. For the most part, because of monads and effects and such you can essentially write better imperative code in haskell.

Im noy sure why youve decided that haskell is incapable of the syntactic appearance of mutation.

Re: Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic

#8

Post by _bxg1 »

jrockway wrote: post #3

> given Go's lack of exceptions, such a feature would be entirely impossible. Haskell is a nice programming language, but ultimately if a program written in language A can run on your computer, a program can be written in language B that can run on your computer and do the same things. If you think "return foo, err" is a lot different than return "Left foo" or "Right err", then you might want to think more about how…

Pedantry is unhelpful. Technically this project could be written in assembly. Have fun doing that.
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