Haskell for a New Decade [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#91

Post by Rick1 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #90

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…

> It takes 2-3 weeks of full-time onboarding > It takes around 3 months of full-time participation Compare that to Erlang's half a day to a day for onboarding, and one to two weeks before pushing stuff to prod. I can't imagine any company that could afford three full-time weeks of onboarding. > investing 3 months for life-long increased productivity (even if it's just a few percentage points; most feel the effect is…

> I can't imagine any company that could afford three full-time weeks of onboarding.

Oh yes. Months even. Routinely.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#92

Post by dmitriid » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:03 AM UTC

nh2 wrote: post #62

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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” a…

> “secret weapon” and do not advertise it Both Standard Chartered and Barclays loudly advertise that they use Haskell. A quick web search turns up their job offers on Reddit, and both also send people to conferences such as Haskell eXchange, to talk about their team tasks, structure, and size. Example: [1] Their code bases were discussed on HN before, e.g. [2]. Standard Chartered also funded the development of GHCs l…

Is Standard Chartered the bank that actually uses its own eager subset of Haskell and built everything in it from scratch?

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#93

Post by develop7 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

jbritton wrote: post #45

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 b…

First, there's a number of preludes around: rio, foundation, relude to name a few. The standard prelude, OTOH, isn't going anywhere anytime soon, because throwing it away would break too much existing code.

I'd love to help you with the roadblocks, but I need more specifics to do that.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#94

Post by FullyFunctional » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:06 AM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #47

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)

(It's a HN rule not to discuss down votes)

However the problem with the parent post of that it presumes Haskell isn't useful because of X, when clearly it's useful for many and changing X would make it not Haskell. That sort of comment isn't useful.

I think for as long as I have known Haskell (1992-) there has been interest in and a desire for a strict variant of Haskell. In 2020 it seems there are a lot more options for that, which is great, but they aren't Haskell.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#95

Post by travisgriggs » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

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'll respect your opinion but sign up for the "not what other people want" crowd.

I started learning Haskell last week. I have a small rest service I need to write and I want to try something new. Why Haskell?

Because I miss seeing excellence/purity in computer languages. Nearly 10 years ago I jumped out of the Smalltalk balloon. It was one of the only languages where Object Oriented felt like a paradigm shift (CLOS and Self were also purist and paradigmy). It was sadly headed for the pile of lost languages.

I have spent the last many years polyglotting, learning and plying Python, Ruby, Objective C, some C++, Kotlin, Swift, Dart (both 1 and 2), Lua, Go, and even a smattering of JavaScript (plus coffee script). It's been a journey through language populism. Language features pulled from multiple disciplines and mashed together with no real rhyme or reason other than what crowd or favorite feature the steering committees cater to at any given point. Consistency and guiding principles seem to be a thing of the past.

I'm too new/naive on the Haskell journey to know what lies ahead. I've discerned that it seems to be one of the golden standards of "pure functional" paradigm. And at 49, I may be too old to be enlightened by another paradigm shift.

But what I yearn for is computer languages that feel like the design elements all work together so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, instead of languages with a checklist of "good ideas" that thrown together create a whole that is lesser than the sums of their features.

Will Haskell take me there? Time will tell. Wish me luck.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#96

Post by gilmi » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #50

pydry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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” a…

This is a very good comment.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#97

Post by goto11 » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:28 AM UTC

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #50

pydry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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” a…

> use Haskell as their “secret weapon” and do not advertise it, in fact those who could speak to details are all under NDA.

I remember hearing this said about Perl back in the day! Language X is so awesome businesses use it in secret because they don't want their competitors to discover the secret to their success.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but you can say it about any language and it can't really be disproven.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#98

Post by gilmi » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

jbritton wrote: post #45

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 b…

There are alternative preludes you could use instead that provide a much better experience. I recommend taking a look at relude [0].

Could you share a bit about your experience with sockets in haskell? I had the chance to use sockets in haskell on multiple occasions and they worked as expected.

[0]: https://kowainik.github.io/projects/relude

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#99

Post by shigeo » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #47

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)

If you remove monadic IO, laziness and immutability from Haskell, then you're a lot closer to OCaml than you are to Haskell.

But more importantly, immutability is used everywhere in the industry.

Re: Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]

#100

Post by tome » Wed, Jun 24, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #92

nh2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “secret weapon” and do not advertise it Both Standard Chartered and Barclays loudly advertise that they use Haskell. A quick web search turns up their job offers on Reddit, and both also send people to conferences such as Haskell eXchange, to talk about their team tasks, structure, and size. Example: [1] Their code bases were discussed on HN before, e.g. [2]. Standard Chartered also funded the development of GHCs l…

Is Standard Chartered the bank that actually uses its own eager subset of Haskell and built everything in it from scratch?

I'm not sure if you're being facetious or asking a genuine question. The answer is "yes", with the exception of the word "actually". The "eager subset" was written to target a pre-existing runtime, which before then only supported an in-house, fairly poorly-designed, functional language called Lambda. Some of the team there wanted to be able to use Haskell instead (understandably).

For stuff that doesn't require that runtime (as convenient as it is) they just use familiar old lazy GHC. My understanding is that they are progressively moving more and more to GHC, although my knowledge is five years out of date.