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Leaving Haskell behind

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Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#311

Post by csb6 »

chpatrick wrote: post #300
nh2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SPJ still allocates part of his working time to Haskell [0]. Also he did not invent Haskell.

[0] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#312

Post by impulser_ »

dcow wrote: post #255
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…

As someone new to using Python professionally after having used it here and there over the course of 15+ years, I’ve run into exactly this problem. It’s pretty standard for a language these days to bundle the dependency manager and build tooling. Python still does this via shell infection. And since there’s 5 different ways to do it it can leave someone trying to figure out what the right vibe is in 2023 spending hou…

Have you tried Rye?

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rye

This is probably the best package manager I used for Python. It feels a lot like Cargo. It sticks to the standards of Python. No custom lock files ect. Uses prebuilt Python so you don't have to build it. Handles global installs easily.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#313

Post by friend_and_foe »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #236
friend_and_foe wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A compiler and an interactive shell/interpreter are all you need You might also want a good testing in the lang or stdlib, and a documentation system.

Well the thing about testing with Haskell, the type system ensures that you're not going to have the most common bugs. If there's an error, it's probably an error in your logic or you did some math wrong or something like that. So testing, you'd basically write tests for your mental model of how the program should operate. And because of the type system you're probably going to use unsafe for a lot of test code.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#314

Post by throwawaymaths »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #313
throwawaymaths wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A compiler and an interactive shell/interpreter are all you need You might also want a good testing in the lang or stdlib, and a documentation system.

Well the thing about testing with Haskell, the type system ensures that you're not going to have the most common bugs. If there's an error, it's probably an error in your logic or you did some math wrong or something like that. So testing, you'd basically write tests for your mental model of how the program should operate. And because of the type system you're probably going to use unsafe for a lot of test code.

Clearly the type system is comprehensively self documenting too.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#315

Post by brightsize »

chubot wrote: post #209
girvo wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Have you had a look at Coconut? I don't know if it'll push all your buttons but whenever I hear someone who's reasonably content with Python but wants more FP goodies I always think of it. https://github.com/evhub/coconut . It's basically a superset of Python3 that transpiles into Python3 and is compatible with MyPy. I don't think I'd code Python w/o it ever again assuming I had the choice. The biggest negative for me is that there's no IDE support for the language last I looked, though of course you can work with the transpiler output (plain Python) in your favorite Python IDE. It might be fun to play around with, I know that I really enjoyed it but then I got spoiled by the language+tooling of Scala3, but if you don't have that option ...

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#316

Post by physicist1337 »

Shumer666 wrote: post #180

First off, learning Haskell's like trying to decipher an alien language. If you're used to plain ol' if-else loops and straightforward variable assignments, prepare to have your brain twisted into knots. Haskell's got monads, and no, they're not some new type of space monster – they're these weird abstract things that'll leave you scratching your head and questioning your life choices. Now, I know we all love librari…

[flagged]

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#317

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,…

> The developer experience improved significantly over the last years.

> Today, you can get a good quality IDE environment with VSCode and Haskell-Language-Server that works in both simple and complex environments, and includes all the features you'd expect (completions, immediate type error checking, scoped renames, go-to-definition, find-all-references, call hierarchy, docs-on-hover).

In 2023 Haskell has indeed kind of reached 2003 levels of IDE support but you can forget about a working debugger, practical compile times or you know, stack traces.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#318

Post by zzo38computer »

yayitswei wrote: post #305
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…

The Blub Paradox is relevant here: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html It's hard to know what you're missing if you haven't tried it. If you see patterns moving data around, it's nice to abstract those out. And higher-level languages give you more powerful abstractions.

I have used many different programming languages (including BASIC, C, Python, JavaScript, Java, Perl, PHP, Haskell, Lisp, and others), even with powerful abstractions (which I can understand how helpful they are), and I still think C is better, and mostly use C. There are improvements which could be made (and I have some ideas of such), but most of the stuff I have seen is usually just worse instead. Some GNU features are good though, and can be used in C, so I often use them.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#319

Post by antod »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #241
steno132 wrote: post #167

If you want to get things done, don't use Haskell. You'll be fighting against the type system constantly. You'll be asking questions on Stack Overflow only to get no response. You'll be rewriting software that's in other language's standard library. Productive programmers don't use Haskell.

You're not wrong, but the thing to know about the type system is once you get it it's like this amazing thing. You start to think about your program in terms of the data it manipulates, you'll find yourself just without effort writing the code that does exactly what you intended, it's pretty wonderful. But on the way there it is painful.

The bathed in a suffusion of blue phase. (or should that be purple?)

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#320

Post by consilient »

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…

> Is all this machinery really helping? Are you sure?

Absolutely: ADTs and general-purpose crud stuff are a perfect fit. It's the delicate numeric stuff where typed functional languages are at their least helpful (though I think still somewhat better than imperative ones, except at the ultra-high performance end).

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