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Is Haskell the Cure?

mathias-biilmann.net

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Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#91

Post by gtani »

pjscott wrote: post #90
gtani wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's also akka which is being incorporated as scala standard lib, and F# MailboxProcessor. The thing is that erlang/OTP and its behaviors have many people pounding on heavily loaded apps in production and improving its toolchain, whereas GHC and akka have recently (last couple years I think) been working ot get the stack working: dispatchers and load balancing (like erland reds), and bring GC up to snuff

Akka looks pretty sweet, but it looks like you still have to worry about blocking code in external libraries. In Haskell (and Erlang, IIRC), blocking code is deferred to a background thread automatically so you don't have to be consciously on-guard for it. You also get proper pre-emptive multithreading, while Akka looks like a hybrid of an event loop and a thread pool. Is this a substantial headache with Akka, in pra…

(late reply)

it's pretty hard to google akka deployments but:

http://www.quora.com/What-companies-are-using-Akka-commercia...

http://groups.google.com/group/akka-user/browse_thread/threa...

and in terms of memory overheads and how many erlang process-type things you can spin up:

http://akka.io/docs/akka/1.1/scala/tutorial-chat-server.html

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#92

Post by thesz »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #58
bobfunk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much what I mean when calling Haskell hard to learn. For me it's also been a steep learning curve, and my experience hasn't been altogether different than yours. I started out maybe 5 years ago following tutorials, reading up on all the metaphors about Monads and doing project Euler problems. After a while I started to tackle some small web related things with Haskell and had exactly your experience of ru…

I think part of the issue with learning haskell is that it seems to invert the typical learning strategy for programming languages. Usually the best advice is read a little, then write a lot. Typically you can just look and some published code and go "ah yes that's how you do it". But I find, for better or worse, Haskell really requires you to understand before you code. Which in the end means your study to code rati…

I think you're wrong at "if you don't understand why it works it probably won't".

While I long given up PUI (Programming Under Influence) I still occasionally do some in Haskell. After a litre of beer I am pretty dumb, but I can follow clues from compiler to get something working.

Most of the time, it works the next day, when I sober. That's in contrast with C/C++. Scripting languages give some power like that, but I can screw myself with them much more violently.

In my humble opinion, Haskell is the language of choice for drunken programmers.

Re: Is Haskell the Cure?

#93

Post by bwfeldman »

ghc wrote: post #8

I love Haskell; I do a lot of work with it. That said, I use Python for the web. As nice as Snap is, Haskell just doesn't have the vast array of quality libraries for web development that Python does. Lately, this means that I do web development in Flask, and heavy lifting in Haskell.

Saw your comment about your desire to launch a product with personality. I'd be happy to help (for free) if you want. @BWFeldman
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