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Leaving Haskell behind

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Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#291

Post by pshc »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #233
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…

Yeah most tooling sucks. I think tooling in general was a bad idea. A compiler and an interactive shell/interpreter are all you need, you look at NPM and the current state of the python package management system, a total disaster. I personally would rather use a language where I had to include all dependencies within my program, rather than automatically fetching them from a remote server, deal with versions and vers…

Python and JavaScript both had their various fragmented package management systems added well after the language was invented and suffer for it. JavaScript is especially hobbled by the need for an intermediary bundling step.

More modern languages like Rust, where tooling was carefully designed in tandem with the initial language release, fare much better in this regard.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#292

Post by earthboundkid »

systems wrote: post #207
movpasd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any issues with Python's packaging ecosystem anymore, having settled comfortably into a pyenv+virtualenv+pip-tools as my "stack" after going around the block a few times. But even so, I must recognise how awful the experience is for new users. It's taken me years to settle into this system, and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them. I also work a lot…

why do sometimes people say things like "and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them" half a day is like almost no time at all half a day is just few hours, how is this a long time .. how is this any time at all makes me doubt myself a bit, am i too mediocre to think that way the previous line make more sense to me "It's taken me years to settle into this system" ,…

The thing that drives me insane about Python packaging is the degree of Stockholm Syndrome. PYTHON PACKAGING HAS KIDNAPPED YOU. YOU DON’T ACTUALLY LOVE IT.

None of Go, JavaScript, or Rust require a half a day to figure out packaging. Don’t defend Python. Push for it to change or leave it behind.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#293

Post by Pannoniae »

jerf wrote: post #213
Pannoniae wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Sure, but if we are talking about a place where let's say functional programming is off-limits entirely (note that I wasn't strictly talking about functional programming in my previous posts; I was talking about anything, any paradigm or tool which helps write more sound, more provable, more stable and less buggy programs)... then the "discipline yourself and enjoy the benefits of FP in less capable languages" will not work either, because in that place, they clearly don't recognise the benefits, the language doesn't encourage it either, so they'll just write the average code as usual.

I am not insulting people personally, I am insulting the "worse is better" culture which is prevalent in the profession. No one has an immutable opinion about this, and I do not think that looking down upon an opinion or set of beliefs is a hostile thing. In a (slightly weird) way, it's actually constructive because it might plant a seed of thought in people that it's possible to do better. I'm doing the opposite of looking down at or insulting people here - I am assuming they are rational and capable of thinking, they just haven't encountered a different mindset than the prevalent and trendy one, and that's a perfectly fine thing.

"Developing/using better tools, languages and trying to change developer culture" is a solution. Sure, not a silver bullet or something achievable quickly or easily, but on a smaller scale, it's definitely possible to achieve success.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#294

Post by mbo »

Tyr42 wrote: post #272
d_burfoot wrote: post #267

As someone who uses a lot of "core" Java (ie not the messy ecosystem), and gets a lot of really complex stuff done with it, I read these articles about high-tech language features like algebraic data types and ultra-strict typing, and I think, what are these people actually doing ? The vast majority of software engineering consists of simple operations that move data from one place to another - from a DB to a JSON fi…

When writing a compiler it helps for sure. Though most of my time is protobuf in Java, I still wouldn't mind having an ADT or two for when I got lists of things and the things aren't exactly uniform but I don't want to make a type hierarchy.

Doesn't `sealed trait ... permits ...` and `record` satisfy that these days for Java? That's what our proto2 `oneof`s generate into.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#295

Post by kahnclusions »

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 too have used several languages and for me Haskell’s is the worst I’ve had the displeasure of using. It could be forgivable if the language itself wasn’t so unfathomable to newcomers.

JavaScript’s situation isn’t great, but it’s still easier to work with than Haskell, in terms of hours of frustration.

For me it’s Rust that has really raised the bar for what quality tooling looks like.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#296

Post by otikik »

RhysU wrote: post #170
otikik wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> filter job offerings based on social utility rather than language stacks Any pointers on how to do this? A person that close to me is thinking about entering the High Frequency Trading world, and I would like to give them some alternatives.

Pushing advertisements to people who don't want to see them? /s Every trade matches two parties who came to the market to trade.

> Pushing advertisements to people who don't want to see them? /s

That’s… where they work at now

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#297

Post by ryukoposting »

In terms of tooling, Haskell has one thing that AFAIK no other language can compete with: Hoogle. Hoogle is amazing. You tell it, in Haskell, what you want, and it tells you, in Haskell, what you can do. It's extraordinary. Someone attempted something similar with Rust, and I even tried to make a Noogle (Nim), but it just doesn't work the same in languages where there's a clear divide between "passing arguments to a function" and "calling a function." I find myself looking at tangles of Rust code with all its Result>>, Box> and I yearn for a Roogle that provides the same level of utility as Hoogle.

Other than that, Haskell's tooling has no redeeming qualities. Nothing (pun intended). A lot of that can be blamed on the community's instinct to make something "innovative" instead of improving what already exists. I feel the author's pain.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#298

Post by sullyj3 »

d_burfoot wrote: post #267

As someone who uses a lot of "core" Java (ie not the messy ecosystem), and gets a lot of really complex stuff done with it, I read these articles about high-tech language features like algebraic data types and ultra-strict typing, and I think, what are these people actually doing ? The vast majority of software engineering consists of simple operations that move data from one place to another - from a DB to a JSON fi…

Possibly you were using "algebraic data types" as a general stand in for fancy type system stuff, but algebraic data types are actually one of the least fancy haskell features. They're much more straightforward than the name might lead you to believe. I think there's a broad consensus that new statically typed languages ought to have them, eg they've been adopted by rust and swift. I find languages that don't support them very irritating to use.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#299

Post by mattgreenrocks »

systems wrote: post #207
movpasd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any issues with Python's packaging ecosystem anymore, having settled comfortably into a pyenv+virtualenv+pip-tools as my "stack" after going around the block a few times. But even so, I must recognise how awful the experience is for new users. It's taken me years to settle into this system, and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them. I also work a lot…

why do sometimes people say things like "and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them" half a day is like almost no time at all half a day is just few hours, how is this a long time .. how is this any time at all makes me doubt myself a bit, am i too mediocre to think that way the previous line make more sense to me "It's taken me years to settle into this system" ,…

Half a day is an eternity when it is makework.

Trudging through old SO answers, bad docs, GitHub issues, overly enthusiastic blog posts by someone making a todo app, and, the coup de gras: hitting paywalls on the one tutorial that might help you.

Factor in much higher rates for more senior devs and it amounts to a lot of waste.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#300

Post by chpatrick »

nh2 wrote: post #269
chpatrick wrote: post #96

I recently went to one of the largest Haskell meetups in Europe and pretty much no one used Haskell any more (including some formerly core people), it was almost just a social gathering. I think in 2023 many of the things that made Haskell appealing compared to other languages before have been widely adopted, while the developer experience and ecosystem for Haskell is as bad as it was. I wouldn't use it for a new pro…

I went to the same meetup (ZuriHac), and arrived at the opposite conclusion. I gave a lightning talk there on how the Haskell job market has been growing steadily since 2008 [1] [2]. The GHC bug tracker is full of new people filing bugs from production environments. Consultancy blogs such as [3] regularly show industry-sponsored improvements to GHC, which was much more infrequent 10 years ago. A this year's ZuriHac,…

Simon Peyton-Jones, the very inventor of the language is now working on Tim Sweeney's Metaverse-themed prolog bullshit. There's no energy left in Haskell.

Haskell has fallen between the cracks as neither a super efficient compiled language or a practical interpreted one. It's just a pain in the ass.

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