TLDR: the Haskell programmer who gives a shit has stopped giving a shit. * http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-...
Seth Briars could be me.
really funny, thanks
Leaving Haskell behind
211–220 of 402 posts
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#212Hm. 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…
You're absolutely right. That is particular example is bad because you don't actually need the power of flapMap/bind. But, if the available containers depended on the flavor and the available toppings depended on the flavor and/or container, then you would need flapMap/bind and do-notation would pull its weight.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one of the problems that people who get overexcited about functional languages and all the strong typing and such have is that they generally start out in a bad place. Imperative programs with every flaw in the book, threading by locks, for loops that try to modify the index mid-loop, mutation running rampant, all the bad things they complain about. I've worked in those code bases in industrial contexts, they…
I apologise for the comparison, as your thoughts are very well-structured, and in my head it almost sounds like an insult. But this kind of thinking ("more discipline minimises the problems related to suboptimal languages") is kind of like Uncle Bob's test-zealotry - i.e. you don't need static typing/AOP/linting/any kind of bug-reducing feature, because you can just write more tests (even if it's painful or spurious)…
I don't really get your point, other than trying to insult everyone. It's fairly well established that in the real world, strict functional programming languages aren't an option. So who really cares that you keep railing on about them? Until they're an actual option, we are not being "zealots" when we can't use them... not "refuse" to, can't... and, yes, you're just being an insulting jerk with no real options to offer anyone.
If you want to be wistful for a world where we could use better languages... get in line. It's a long one. But stop expressing it in the form of insulting other people.
You are not the smartest in the room, you are not the only one who has grappled with the issues, and if you'd stop going out of your way to insult everyone else, maybe you could listen to and learn from people offering solutions. Even if they aren't perfect; it's hardly as if you're offering a perfect one either. You aren't offering one at all.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#214As 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 simply wanted to filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks I wish more people did that.
In my experience the organizations that claim to have social utility fail at it and don't pay well.
Language stacks are much easier to fact check.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are job security features :P Seriously though, the hours spent fighting dependency injection and Hibernate issues alone, when working on a really big Java project, could've been a full-time job. For maximum fun, I once worked on a large ERP system that started out as a Struts 2/Hibernate 3/Jetty project and had an entire Rails app bolted on using JRuby. Some of the stuff in the JRuby side was injected thru Spri…
Gross
I know, right? Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed through that system every year. I got the ball rolling on killing that design with fire after we hit one of the pathological limits in IIRC Hibernate 3 and thread safety.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m still thirsty for a PL that is essentially OCaml but with a better syntax. But that’s just me. Not just you, me too! In fact it’s why I went in deep on Reason when it arrived initially. Shame it never really got traction.
Me three! I came from Python (now with MyPy), learned OCaml and liked some aspects, was intrigued by Reason -- and also sad it seems to be in limbo. I also miss early returns, and break/continue. I would like "modern ML" / "Python with sum types" / "Rust with GC" language (indentation/braces doesn't matter to me). Many people seem to agree. Recently I found TypeScript is kinda fun for this, at least if you're startin…
I wanted to be a fan of TypeScript and get to use it daily on my job, but actual experience made me dislike the language. I think you already know the pain of external libraries (Express in my case) since you mentioned the ecosystem baggage, and the lack of pattern matching is another big minus for me.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scala 3 was a massive step forward. Though for whatever reason it seems that its popularity is declining. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/jdegoes/status/1656566825356754945
Because Scala 3, as great as it is, has fractured the community and caused a lot of churn. Twice, just in my recent job history, have I worked for companies that were using Scala 2 for a long time but are now deciding to develop new projects in Java and/or Kotlin instead.
I think that is less about Scala 3, and more that the companies were not committed to the use of Scala, and would eventually move to some other flavor of the month language, such as Go or Rust.
The transition to Scala 3 at my current job has not been an issue. Scala 3 is mostly the same language, with some nice new features which are optional. Our old projects are still on Scala 2, as there isn't a huge benefit from upgrading.
The main downside in upgrading was library support, but we are now 2+ years since the release of Scala 3, the issue is mostly solved unless you depend on unmaintained libraries.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
What dependency and backwards compatibility issues does Python have? That other languages don't?
Python software simply rots while you're not watching it. Either you make it a full time occupation, every time some library gets an 'upgrade' (with a ton of breaking changes) you get to rewrite your code, sometimes in non-obvious and intrusive ways. And every time the language changes in some breaking way you get to spend (lots of) time on debugging hard to track down problems because the codebases they occur in are…
Are you pinning your dependency versions? If so, things should all still work later.
If you upgrade libs then sometimes you need to do some work. I’ve found python libs to be pretty stable though so it’s never too bad.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#219> the constant changes that [...] cause regular breakages Wow, for a language as mature as Haskell I find that surprising. I never really got into Haskell for other reasons, but this one warns me to stay away for the foreseeable future.
I Haskelled quite a lot from 2014 to 2017 on a futile side project, and developed/extracted and maintained a few libraries on Hackage and a couple that were included on Stackage. In my experience most of the breakage comes from dependencies, not the language. The biggest shift in my time was the Functor-Monad-Applicative Proposal and I don't think that broke anything for me. Technically it was not even a change in the language but in core type-classes distributed with GHC and used in every Haskell program.
As far as I know, Haskell 98 still compiles most of the same programs it did 25 years ago. Some extensions that are commonly used have introduced breaking changes I believe, but I don't remember the details. But I gave up maintaining my projects because 1. I wasn't using them (because I moved away from Haskell, for mostly the reasons in the OP which I feel like I could have written myself almost) and 2. my dependencies kept breaking them.
Re: Leaving Haskell behind
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maven or Gradle
I feel like Maven is doomed by its history. When Maven was created, expressing dependencies with version ranges was encouraged. But there was no lockfile concept, so that did not work well. Instead of adding lockfiles, they decided to leave the tool as it was but encourage people not to use dependency ranges. But dependency ranges are still supported, so you need a plugin to check your POM files and make sure you are…
> expressing dependencies with version ranges was encouraged
In years of Java development, I've seen that only once, maybe twice.
And this was 8+ years ago.