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Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

dev.stephendiehl.com

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Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#41

Post by philzook »

nextos wrote: post #10

Very informative slides. I do not have real-world experience with Haskell, aside from little toy projects, but I have a lot of experience with other functional languages in the ML family and Scheme. Idris 2 looks appealing, but they should have also mentioned other approaches like Fstar, Lean and Z3. I quite like Fstar since they are delivering a big verified code base, as implied by the name of the effort: Project E…

Those are interesting approaches. I'm pretty pumped about Lean. It may just not have fit into his narrative and he can't talk about everything. Fstar and Lean are more children of Coq and ML (at least syntactically) to my understanding than they are children of Haskell. They're cousins. Although everyone influences everyone of course.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#42

Post by pydry »

nh2 wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

I've always been somewhat skeptical of Haskell due to the scarcity of things you could point to and say "that was made with Haskell and it made it so much better". it's usually the same 3 pieces of software people point to, none of which are particularly noteworthy.

with rust, by contrast, which is ostensibly much less general purpose and hasn't been around as long there's already quite a collection and it's easy to see why it was chosen for those things.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#43

Post by iso8859-1 »

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #11

> "The barrier to entry for GHC development remains impossibly high" Could not agree more. I've put in a couple merge requests to the ghc Haskell compiler, and it's very difficult to even figure out what's going on, nevermind make a meaningful contribution.

What is an easier compiler to get into? Interpreters do not count ;)

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#44

Post by [deleted] »

nh2 wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

[deleted]

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#45

Post by jbritton »

I tried twice to get started with Haskell. I understand the language well enough, but the standard prelude gave me problems. I forget the details, but the first attempt involved reading ASCII strings from file. I had some issue with the standard string type and after a bunch of searching and trying other things, nothing worked. The second time I tried to use sockets. After a few days, I discovered sockets were both broken and deprecated.

Haskell needs to replace the standard prelude and burn the old documentation.

I have used dozens of languages and never really had any problems.

But the simplest of tasks in Haskell immediately put up roadblocks.

I’m sure if I had sufficient reason I could get passed these problems, but when easy things are not easy one loses interest fast.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#47

Post by alexashka »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #17

When will Haskell get a different spokesperson? Stephen isn’t effective in this role. These posts have jumped the shark to the point when I see a big Haskell post on HN and see stephendiehl.com it’s just time to tune out. For Haskell to succeed, it has to move away from rigid commitment to various pure functional paradigms and move to eager execution by default. But Stephen does not help this, just preferring to inst…

The types of posts that get downvoted on here is at times maddening.

This to me, is the only reply thus far that addresses what I also perceive to be the fundamental problem with Haskell - it doesn't provide any new convenient tools to solve real world problems, while requiring one learns a bunch of useless abstractions that aren't used anywhere else in industry as a default (monads, laziness, immutability)

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#48

Post by quickthrower2 »

nh2 wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

Thanks for that.

Everything you said is from the perspective on being not only in a Haskell job but in a Haskell team. Your 3 months is 5 years for someone trying to learn on their own in their spare time. And then they need this to get a Haskell job due to the competition for such job and the queue of super smart people lining up for a Haskell job. And the pay cuts are brutal. Now you are an outlier, working on a Haskell team for Google, the rare triad of using Haskell at work, presumably being well paid, and having that mentorship from other team members.

> After 6 years of industrial Haskell, I know nothing about category theory. It has not prevented me from using web frameworks.

As someone in as Haskell team, maybe this is possible. You don't have to try and pick apart the online knowledge. For example a lot of libraries use Lens. I want to understand Lens? It is not simple: check out the diagram on https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens. "Yeah but it's just X Y Z". Great - I've been to many FP meetups, and seen a lot of stuff online and there is no simple help for this stuff.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#49

Post by quickthrower2 »

nightski wrote: post #19
quickthrower2 wrote: post #9

I think the focus on Haskell is missing the mark a bit. Haskell is about programming language researchers and enthusiasts having a excellent example language to try out ideas. Over the years it has turned into a production ready platform. As the PDF shows there are many languages spun off Haskell and it doesn't even mention them all. Then there are language features in C# and Java, Typescript etc. that are coming acr…

I can't speak for everyone but for me the type system is not what made Haskell difficult. I loved it. What made it difficult was laziness. I'd find myself always trying to reason about execution (even though most of the time you probably shouldn't). Laziness might even be fine in a world built around it, but for a language to be practical it has to interface with systems that are not designed that way (numerous exter…

I find the type system and the errors difficult. The basics are easy (like you would use in Elm for example) but once you are talking about types that are related to other types, GHC extensions and all that, I quickly run into inscrutable errors that might take 1-2 hours of Googling to resolve.

Basic Haskell is lovely though. It's why I liked Elm initially although it does take it a bit too far in the basic direction.

The problem with Haskell is it's purity and thirst for abstraction means more and more complex type definitions and ideas - monad transformers (yes I know they are supposed to be 'easy') - and GADTs for example. And if you want to use libraries, you need to get these concepts to merely be able to read the example code. It's table stakes like known what "npm i" means when looking at a node module doco.

Javascript on the other hand, for all it's warts, allows you to cheat by wrangling directly with the data. This has a lot of issues but it is a lot easier to grok - to the point where non programmers use it as a scripting language. Sometimes people do some weird shit with proxies/promises - and you'll get that type of code in any Turing-Complete and useful language, but on the whole most libraries do keep it simple and scrutable.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#50

Post by JoelMcCracken »

pydry wrote: post #42
nh2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point on "investment": I was in a Haskell team at Google, and have trained groups at various companies professionally. From that experience, for a normal developer with working experience in Java, Python, or C++: * It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding (half with a coach, half self-study) to work on a typical industrial Haskell project. * It takes around 3 months of full-time participation in such a proj…

I've always been somewhat skeptical of Haskell due to the scarcity of things you could point to and say "that was made with Haskell and it made it so much better". it's usually the same 3 pieces of software people point to, none of which are particularly noteworthy. with rust, by contrast, which is ostensibly much less general purpose and hasn't been around as long there's already quite a collection and it's easy to…

Haskell does have an issue of people using it being more interested in doing clever things and researching topics than building cool applications.

Haskell jobs do exist, I have one of them. The big problem is that there are more people who want to do those jobs than there are jobs, so they seem very scarce.

But anyway there are also a number of investment banks I have heard that use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA.

Personally I am hoping to help with this issue by building cool open source things in Haskell (and purescript)

I was skeptical for years for all the reasons you said, but I finally decided to set my skepticism aside and see for myself, and oh boy is Haskell great. It has a lot of problems, but I consider myself at least 2x more productive in Haskell.

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