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Leaving Haskell behind

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Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#31

Post by xedrac »

Pannoniae wrote: post #19
xedrac wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lamentations about bad tooling I think it's less about linters and more about basic tooling for toolchains, dependencies, cross compiling, lsp, etc... compare the Haskell tooling to Rust tooling and it's easy to see how deficient it is. > Backwards compatibility is simply a design aspect, not some holy commandment you must adhere to all times. It's also something that has enormous influence on industry adoption. I…

Sure, it might help with industrial adoption, but the more you commit to backward compatibility, the more mediocre your language becomes. (You can't really adapt new things if you have to keep everything around.) What's the point in creating the N+1th generic blub language?

What's the point of creating a language that isn't used? If the goal of the language is to academically research new programming techniques, then fine. Other languages will eventually adopt some of the more useful ideas and industry development will improve because of it.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#32

Post by pyrale »

Tainnor wrote: post #23
pyrale wrote: post #20

As someone that has also written haskell for about a decade and moved away from it as a breadwinner recently (but for other reasons - I simply wanted to filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks), I definitely agree with the author's first point: the Haskell community values learning extremely strongly. That's great because you work with curious people that have always something to teac…

I've also used several languages and IMHO, Haskell's tooling is some of the worst. Language server breaks with random errors all the time for me, I'm always confused about whether I should have ghcup or stack manage my Haskell versions (and what the benefits and drawbacks are), and so on. I have a project I work on from time to time, and I'm 100% sure that the next time I'll open it up, it will stop working again. Py…

I've used stack+stackage, and I can still run all of my older projects. I agree that as a newcomer the choice is not evident, haskell is a small enough community that finding mentorship is not always evident if you don't know where to look.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#33

Post by Tainnor »

regularfry wrote: post #22

Hm. Not really convinced by either Ruby counter-example. The first one's ok, ish, but doesn't take advantage of the fact you can pass a block to `zip` so you don't need the `map` call. The second one's just wrong. You wouldn't use `flat_map` for that if you didn't want indentation, you'd use `Enumerator#product`: def all_flavors flavors = [:vanilla, :chocolate, :strawberry] containers = [:cone, :cup] toppings = [:spr…

The point is that Haskell's do notation works for every monad, whereas "product" in Ruby works for just a cartesian product of sets, and not any other use of monads (e.g. generating random values, async code, operations that might return errors, IO operations, and so on).

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#34

Post by pooya72 »

mberning wrote: post #27
pyrale wrote: post #20

As someone that has also written haskell for about a decade and moved away from it as a breadwinner recently (but for other reasons - I simply wanted to filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks), I definitely agree with the author's first point: the Haskell community values learning extremely strongly. That's great because you work with curious people that have always something to teac…

I’m a bit incredulous that Java’s tooling is in the “sucks” category. You could say a lot of negative things about Java, but the tools available freely and commercially are in a league of their own.

Yes, it's definitely much easier to get up and running with Java than it is with Haskell. This includes everything from setting up the JDK, setting up your IDE, to building and deploying your applications.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#35

Post by pyrale »

regularfry wrote: post #30
pyrale wrote: post #20

As someone that has also written haskell for about a decade and moved away from it as a breadwinner recently (but for other reasons - I simply wanted to filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks), I definitely agree with the author's first point: the Haskell community values learning extremely strongly. That's great because you work with curious people that have always something to teac…

Cargo is an evolution of older ideas from Ruby's bundler, so in a sense it does have a longer pedigree than most other tools of that ilk. Bundler mostly doesn't suck. There are design choices I disagree with but there's a happy path to using it that gets a lot right. There are ways to do language tooling that don't suck. Without much direct experience of cargo I can't say whether that carries across, but I wouldn't b…

> so in a sense it does have a longer pedigree than most other tools of that ilk.

That's true of most new languages. It seems like most projects these days can produce a LSP with minimal effort, make the obvious choice of sandboxing every project separately to avoid dependency hells across projects, have at least basic distribution systems even with small communities, etc.

The community learned a lot from the mistakes of yore.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#37

Post by jamincan »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #12
Pannoniae wrote: post #6

Basically, the author's criticism is that the language is too powerful, too expressive, people try very abstract things, tooling is bad and no one cares about the language. There is something sinister in this - first, in the author's lamentations about bad tooling. Other languages require linters, formatters, static analysers, etc. because the language's built-in features and type system are sub-par. In Haskell, that…

> Second, this is similar to the "equalise things by dragging everyone down to the same level"-type of thinking. > and not allowing for an opportunity to write really good code. Basically, enforced mediocrity. > straightforward, laziest, zero optimisation code, and giving themselves an excuse for that. > justify their laziness, Jesus christ you have so much disdain for such a large set of people. Have you ever consid…

> Sometimes I wonder if some language communities really are cults. It's the same with Lisp - replace "type system" with "homoiconic" and you have the exact same mantras about ultimate supremacy and "intellectual" superiority. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and across probably 10 computing devices in my home, not a single one has any Haskell or Lisp programs running on it. Lots of Java, C, C++, Python, Rust, Bash, JavaScript, even Perl (probably) but not a single binary compiled from Haskell or Lisp interpreter to be found. To any reasonable person, that should be a strong signal about the so called "power" and value of their sacred cow.

Xmonad and pandoc are probably the most heavily used Haskell programs. Not necessarily contradicting your overall point, just exhibiting the two examples that someone might reasonably be expected to run into.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#38

Post by Tainnor »

mberning wrote: post #27
pyrale wrote: post #20

As someone that has also written haskell for about a decade and moved away from it as a breadwinner recently (but for other reasons - I simply wanted to filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks), I definitely agree with the author's first point: the Haskell community values learning extremely strongly. That's great because you work with curious people that have always something to teac…

I’m a bit incredulous that Java’s tooling is in the “sucks” category. You could say a lot of negative things about Java, but the tools available freely and commercially are in a league of their own.

I think it's nuanced. IDEs are great, but there's often a lack of good CLI tools and they often show their age. For example, I find checkstyle rather annoying to configure and use.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#40

Post by consilient »

Pannoniae wrote: post #6

Basically, the author's criticism is that the language is too powerful, too expressive, people try very abstract things, tooling is bad and no one cares about the language. There is something sinister in this - first, in the author's lamentations about bad tooling. Other languages require linters, formatters, static analysers, etc. because the language's built-in features and type system are sub-par. In Haskell, that…

> Basically, the author's criticism is that the language is too powerful, too expressive, people try very abstract things

I think this is a bit unfair. The author's criticism is that people try very abstract things and don't stick the landing. And to an extent I agree, but the problem isn't that Haskell is too powerful, it's that it's just barely powerful enough for too many things. Contra the author, GADTs are not one of those things, and snoyman can pry them from my cold dead hands. But singletons clearly are. So are impredicativity, open type families, type level arithmetic, and Template Haskell. Idiomatic Haskell practically writes itself, but type-level Haskell is at least as hard as C, and it's almost entirely because of how terrible the ergonomics are.

> Third, about backwards compatibility

Strongly agree here, if anything GHC doesn't break backwards compatibility enough. `Num` is an abomination.

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