When Haskell was a hot topic around two decades ago, ML was also quite often discussed. Today ML almost only means machine learning
I learned Haskell in just 15 years
61–70 of 240 posts
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a benefit if you're already familiar with writing functions like that? Is it wrong for me to expect that most programmers are already familiar with functions that only use their inputs, but treat that style as significantly more optional? I wrote pure functions for a minute there but that's not the same, a function that only uses its inputs can modify an object while a pure function would have to return a ne…
> Is it wrong for me to expect that most programmers are already familiar with functions that only use their inputs They'll experience no friction when using Haskell then. Haskell only refuses to compile when you declare "Oh yeah I know functions from other languages this is easy" but then do some mutation in your implementation.
> They'll experience no friction when using Haskell then.
The question was what benefit you'd get from learning a functional language, though. Existing knowledge making it easier to switch to a functional language is the inverse of that.
And there's no assumption they'll actually be making things in Haskell, so easy switching isn't by itself a benefit.
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#63Great read! Can anyone here recommend a good resource for learning Haskell that's in the style of "Text-Mode Games as First Haskell Projects"? Haskell has been on my radar since forever, and I've got some FP concepts internalized by making a side project in F#, but I have no idea what a monad really is and a fun prohect to code along might be perfect.
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Haskell pure? It has exceptions You can divide by zero It has unsafe IO primitives
I feel like exceptions where added as a mix of "look we can do that too" and "maybe if so many functions return optional values then it is going to be too much of a pain to use" In hindsight I think few would now regret not having added them in the first place.
> maybe if so many functions return optional values then it is going to be too much of a pain to use
I strongly believe that there is a point in the PL design space that makes optionals everywhere usable. Maybe Haskell can still be the language that delivers this.
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#65Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#66What's the benefit of learning a PURE functional programming language, opposed to just using a language which has adapted the best bits and pieces from the functional programming paradigm? Given that you want write code that sees "real world" use, and is used to handle data and events from the real world. To me, sometimes the line between optimized code and intellectual curiosity blurs.
> Given that you want write code that sees "real world" use, and is used to handle data and events from the real world. Real world? As opposed to what? Is there any benefit to answering such polemical questions as if they are not rhetorical?
As opposed to the abstract academic world?
The only time I had contact with Haskell was in university and I did not see it appealing back then, nor now, nor have I ever seen a program that I use, written in it.
So learning a bit of pure Haskell might have been beneficial for me to become a better programmer, but I still fail to see it being more than that - a academic language. Useful for didactic purposes. Less to actually ship software.
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right: "pure" is not a well-defined concept. The well-defined concept that describes Haskell's benefits in this regard is "referential transparency". That means that this code let x = in ... x ... x ... (i.e. defining a variable x and then using it some number of times) is equivalent to ... ... ... Seen in the opposite direction (transforming the bottom code to the top code) this means that extracting repeated…
Well, technically that isn't true if you use, for example, unsafePerfomIO in the defintion of x. Referential transparency is still a spectrum, just like purity. Haskell is much closer to purity than the vast majority of languages out there. Also, even if Haskell were perfectly pure, the fact that it uses lazy evaluation is far more important to actually being able to make use of referential transparency. In a strict…
> technically that isn't true if you use, for example, unsafePerfomIO in the defintion of x
Ah, well, regardless of whether it holds in Haskell, referential transparency is a well-defined concept. Purity is not a well-defined concept (at least as far as I know. Please share a formal definition if you have one!). That's primarily what I'm trying to say.
But I also disagree with your point about unsafePerformIO. In practice, nothing in Haskell violates referential transparency in a significant way. Who knows why? It's an emergent phenomenon that in principle need not have occurred, but in practice it did. Debug.Trace and similar are about the only things that technically violate referential transparency (and they are extremely tame).
> the fact that it uses lazy evaluation is far more important to actually being able to make use of referential transparency
Yes, I agree with that.
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like exceptions where added as a mix of "look we can do that too" and "maybe if so many functions return optional values then it is going to be too much of a pain to use" In hindsight I think few would now regret not having added them in the first place.
> maybe if so many functions return optional values then it is going to be too much of a pain to use I strongly believe that there is a point in the PL design space that makes optionals everywhere usable. Maybe Haskell can still be the language that delivers this.
To plug my own solution, my effect system Bluefin makes exceptions visible in the type, well-scoped, and also freely composable with all other effects:
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/bluefin-0.0.3.0/docs/Blu...
Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#69Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take of the day: you learn that with imperative programming just as well. I familiarized myself with fp to the point of writing scheme and haskell around 15 years ago. Read the classics, understood advanced typing, lambda calculus and so on. The best “fp” I’m using nowadays is closures, currying in the form of func.bind(this[, first]) and map/filter. Which all are absolutely learnable by the means of closures, wh…
> These FP talks are disguised elitism imo (not necessarily bad faith). Beta reduction and monadic transformers sound so cool, but that’s it job-wise. They may be disguised mathematics. People are into math because it is neat / elegant / cool. So they study it regardless of whether it has a practical use or not.
Some programmers have serious math envy. This can be good if they are self aware about it and keep it in check, because it makes them better programmers. Otherwise they can a pain to work with. Seniors should be people that have dealt with this aspect of their own talent, not juniors who are promoted in spite of or because of it