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Haskell in Production

felixmulder.com

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Re: Haskell in Production

#31

Post by ratww »

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've been using Haskell on and off for almost ten years, and the "front end" of the language, including its syntax, is pretty much the only thing that I absolutely hate about it.

The endless operators, all the language extensions required in 2019, the madness called Template Haskell, the absurdity of point free style, the multiple ways of achieving things by cleverly using . and $, the uncanny valley of do-notation (why does it look different? F# gets it right). It's too easy to be clever. It's too easy to take shortcuts that the next person won't understand.

I'm completely fine with the underlying semantics! Lazy evaluation, the majestic typechecker, concepts like monads, functors, lenses. Even when it comes to syntax, I love how functions are declared, the way parenthesis work, currying, all the "simple stuff". I adore all those concepts and apply them to other languages. I long for a Haskell-like language without the stuff I mentioned above.

I think the problem is that in Haskell everything feels like an afterthought, everything feels "bolt on" rather than "built in". 99% of the hot stuff is implemented using libraries. That's similar to Lisp and C++, other languages I hate (I also love Lisp parens, but I hate macros). Now that I think about it, I prefer less extensible languages that require adding code to the compiler to extend it: C#, F#, Go, JavaScript.

Re: Haskell in Production

#32

Post by maximente »

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…

in my (limited) experience, Haskell projects (and to a slightly lesser extent, functional programming projects) work best when thoroughly planned out in thorough whiteboard/spec sessions and are then implemented by a couple of gurus responsible for the code, who work almost exclusively in functional languages in their day to day. there seems to be a need for way more thought-per-line-of-code in Haskell/FP projects.

many engineers (and businesses!), culturally, come from the opposite angle (legions of generally pluggable engineers on java/python/golang plowing through tickets/features). that's fine, but it isn't super amenable to the Haskell world, because IME non-imperative setups require different mode of thinking about design, so harder to drop in and crush a ticket. i wish i could explain this more, but i'm struggling to articulate with examples.

i think the thorough types really help you get up to speed on data structures, but unless you are in a functional mindset pretty much exclusively, your (my?) brain spends a lot of time un-imperative-ing itself. also, laziness can be a factor, so need some expertise there.

it also helps to have conventions e.g. old school java (are we point free, or not? etc. etc.)

all in all i think it requires a lot of discipline that can easily break down, whereas some of the popular imperative languages you can still sort of plug along (=> punt the technical debt) despite that.

Re: Haskell in Production

#33

Post by dukerutledge »

maximente wrote: post #32
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…

in my (limited) experience, Haskell projects (and to a slightly lesser extent, functional programming projects) work best when thoroughly planned out in thorough whiteboard/spec sessions and are then implemented by a couple of gurus responsible for the code, who work almost exclusively in functional languages in their day to day. there seems to be a need for way more thought-per-line-of-code in Haskell/FP projects. m…

> all in all i think it requires a lot of discipline that can easily break down, whereas some of the popular imperative languages you can still sort of plug along (=> punt the technical debt) despite that.

Interestingly I have the exact opposite perspective. Writing imperative or OOP code requires me to be excessively disciplined. It is extremely easy to build un-maintainable spaghetti. There is a whole cottage industry of methods for your discipline of choice: Clean, SOLID, TDD, etc. All these disciplines seem to boil down to the same systemic result, push effects to the edges of you program so you can more easily test, evolve and maintain. Functional programming (of the typed variety) tends to allow me to write garbage code, that is testable and can be easily evolved and maintained because the paradigm encourages me to be a good actor.

I've refactored production code in imperative languages and typed functional languages and only one of them allowed me to make HUGE sweeping changes with ease and high confidence.

Re: Haskell in Production

#34

Post by foopdoopfoop »

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…

Sounds like you've barely programmed in Haskell and don't know what you're talking about.

> It is extremely hard to learn

Haskell was the first language I learned. I didn't think this at all and I still don't. It doesn't strike me as any more difficult than learning Java or something.

You may think this because Haskell is a different paradigm than what you're used to, so while you may be able to get quickly started with Rust coming from a C++ background, Haskell will take more work because what you already know doesn't intersect with what you need to know quite as well. You may misconstrue this mismatch as Haskell being more difficult to learn.

> extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax

I think Haskell syntax is less confusing/complicated than many other language. Unlike a lot of other languages, Haskell doesn't have a lot of things baked-in. As an example, lot of oft-used functions are "user-space" functions that anyone could define themselves. Like `($)` or `otherwise`.

> If I stood up in a corporate business boardroom meeting for tech analysis on a new project and said "I want to write it in Haskell", I'd get laughed + kicked out.

This is such a stupid argument: what relevance is the opinion of boardroom meeting attendees on the suitability of Haskell for a project?

It sounds like you're hating on Haskell out of ignorance and some personal encounter with the language that went poorly. Instead of actually being informed.

Re: Haskell in Production

#37

Post by tmpz »

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…

"Complicated" and "weird syntax" are pretty subjective measures to define how good a programming language is. C++ is weird and complicated to me.

Re: Haskell in Production

#38

Post by timbuckley »

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…

> It's a beautiful language but it lacks a lot of features to make it useable at scale.

Can you expand on this? What features is it missing?

Re: Haskell in Production

#39

Post by journalctl »

brokencode wrote: post #21
epsolos wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I fondly remember being confused by “return” for weeks (granted, I was 9). What are you returning? And to where? And why was it only one thing? And where did it go when it got there?

It’s easy to forget how hard something was to learn once you already know it.

Re: Haskell in Production

#40

Post by excursionist »

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

Haskell syntax is great except for the indentation/layout rules. There is no simple definition of the grammar with regards to the layout. It's only specified as a headache-inducting operation of a state machine [1], and the implementation is quite hard to read. This is fine for writing Haskell, but quite painful if you want to parse it.

[1]https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch10...

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