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Haskell in Production

felixmulder.com

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Re: Haskell in Production

#21

Post by brokencode »

epsolos wrote: post #17
rifung wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax? I actually really like the syntax for the most part

Most people that have worked as developers/programmers/etc. that don't have a lot of exposure to or training in fp find it painfully hard to learn. This could be one of those cases.

To them, I would suggest that they remember back to when they learned their first imperative language like Java or C. For me, that was really difficult to wrap my mind around at the time, but now those languages are second nature to me. I kind of suspect that if everyone were exposed to a functional language first, there would be a lot fewer people who think they are extremely hard to learn.

Re: Haskell in Production

#22

Post by leshow »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #9

> Haskell is great for business and great in production. Hot take: no it isn't. It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I question the payoff immensely. I question the well-being of anybody who subjects themselves to the pain and torture that is Haskell. If I stood up in a corporate business boardroom meeting for tech analysis on a new project and said "I want to…

That's a really strong opinion to present with absolutely no evidence.

Re: Haskell in Production

#24

Post by nightski »

non-entity wrote: post #20
madhadron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hot take: no it isn't. Odd. I did some Haskell in prodution (hardware control and Unix daemons) and it was delightful. > It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I question the payoff immensely. It is unfamiliar if you have only worked in the C family of languages. The syntax is quite similar to the rest of the ML family, which dates back to 1973. It's basically…

> The syntax is quite similar to the rest of the ML family, which dates back to 1973. How close is it to say something Like F# then? I've toyed with F# a bit and was able to pick it up pretty decently, but a lot of Haskell still looks foreign to me

If you know F# you are going to feel a lot more comfortable than coming from say C/C++/C#.

The largest difference imo between F#/Ocaml and Haskell is the evaluation model where Haskell is lazy by default.

Re: Haskell in Production

#25

Post by Barrin92 »

rifung wrote: post #13
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #9

> Haskell is great for business and great in production. Hot take: no it isn't. It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I question the payoff immensely. I question the well-being of anybody who subjects themselves to the pain and torture that is Haskell. If I stood up in a corporate business boardroom meeting for tech analysis on a new project and said "I want to…

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax? I actually really like the syntax for the most part

I'm not the OP but I would agree and my problem with the syntax is the number of symbols that don't make the semantics clear at all. The Lens library for example, but also a lot of standard stuff like the bind operator, it's extremely complex. Many people also seem to go overboard on the dot notation which can be very hard to read.

Re: Haskell in Production

#26

Post by olah_1 »

rifung wrote: post #13
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #9

> Haskell is great for business and great in production. Hot take: no it isn't. It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I question the payoff immensely. I question the well-being of anybody who subjects themselves to the pain and torture that is Haskell. If I stood up in a corporate business boardroom meeting for tech analysis on a new project and said "I want to…

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax? I actually really like the syntax for the most part

>but what's wrong with the syntax?

I'll just link to this blog about readable Haskell. If everyone followed his advise, it would be much better.

http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskel...

Re: Haskell in Production

#27

Post by dukerutledge »

danharaj wrote: post #18
gip wrote: post #11

> Haskell is great for business and great in production I disagree. It's a beautiful language but it lacks a lot of features to make it useable at scale. And in my experience Haskell engineers are extremely smart but the environment/culture they create makes it difficult to foster team spirit. I've been in 2 companies in the last 4 years who initially used Haskell in production. One has transitioned to Go and the oth…

Hey you. I'm pretty sure I know who you are :) I hope everything's going well! I definitely agree that there are many examples of ineffective Haskell culture. As a Haskell contractor I get to see how a lot of different shops do things. One thing I can't really tease apart is that most startups have a lot of engineering culture problems, and picking Haskell doesn't inoculate you from that effect. The main cultural iss…

This is pretty sound advice for any language. You always want most of your code to be dumb. You save high abstraction for things that have a sensible interface and are common enough to need DRYing. Haskell has a higher abstraction ceiling than most languages and there is less trodden ground, so there may be more opportunity to get lost down the rabbit hole. However Haskell2010 is a beautifully simple language that can solve all your problems (maybe with a bit more code than enabling 20 extensions will afford you).

Re: Haskell in Production

#28

Post by ljm »

gip wrote: post #11

> Haskell is great for business and great in production I disagree. It's a beautiful language but it lacks a lot of features to make it useable at scale. And in my experience Haskell engineers are extremely smart but the environment/culture they create makes it difficult to foster team spirit. I've been in 2 companies in the last 4 years who initially used Haskell in production. One has transitioned to Go and the oth…

I’ve met some pretty damn solid engineers who started on Haskell and, even at a junior level in other languages, produce an elegant solution far more easily than a senior engineer in that language. You probably wouldn’t put the code in production verbatim but you can very easily see what’s going on and it isn’t haunted by spectre of early abstraction, which IMO is the biggest flaw of OOP at scale.

People think you want to see clean architecture in the form of lots of indirection and state and then you don’t see any real programming chops, just organisation or filing.

Not at all related to Haskell specifically, but damn, it does cut through the boilerplate. Although I can’t comment on any sort of Haskell at scale and I imagine they have the same issues when it comes to excessive point-free/applicative style.

I mean, from my naive perspective it’s easy to make classes out of everything, and to hold state and put side-effects everywhere, but you don’t want to deal with the trouble of a monad until you need it. So you have an automatic inclination towards cleaner code when you start functional and move on.

Re: Haskell in Production

#29

Post by brianberns »

olah_1 wrote: post #26
rifung wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I agree with your other points but what's wrong with the syntax? I actually really like the syntax for the most part

>but what's wrong with the syntax? I'll just link to this blog about readable Haskell. If everyone followed his advise, it would be much better. http://www.haskellforall.com/2015/09/how-to-make-your-haskel...

Thanks. That's a good blog. The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell. F# uses 
    print
This means: Take the result of 4 * 2 and send it to `even`, then take that result and send it to `print`. Or you can write it with forward pipes to make it even clearer:

    4 * 2 |> even |> print
The thing about backward pipes is that they're often used to avoid parentheses, which is IMHO a good idea. It's just that thinking of them as "function application" is confusing. F#'s operators makes the data flow clear.

[Side note: The mathematical symbol for function composition is the circle operator, ∘, which is also confusing for the same reason. Does (g ∘ f)(x) mean g(f(x)) or f(g(x))? Personally, I can never remember. If math used F#'s >> and > g sends the output of f to g, so (f >> g)(x) means g(f(x)).]

Re: Haskell in Production

#30

Post by madhadron »

non-entity wrote: post #20
madhadron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hot take: no it isn't. Odd. I did some Haskell in prodution (hardware control and Unix daemons) and it was delightful. > It is extremely hard to learn, has an extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax and I question the payoff immensely. It is unfamiliar if you have only worked in the C family of languages. The syntax is quite similar to the rest of the ML family, which dates back to 1973. It's basically…

> The syntax is quite similar to the rest of the ML family, which dates back to 1973. How close is it to say something Like F# then? I've toyed with F# a bit and was able to pick it up pretty decently, but a lot of Haskell still looks foreign to me

Really close. :: between variable name and type instead of : and similarly superficial things. As the sibling comment pointed out, the semantics can take some time to wrap your brain around.
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