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I learned Haskell in just 15 years

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Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#131

Post by tome »

crabbone wrote: post #129
empath75 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a college dropout and self taught bash and python programmer and quite some time ago, I read about Haskell, decided to teach myself to use it, and then realized I had absolutely no idea what programming actually was, and basically spent the next 15 years teaching myself computer science, category theory, abstract algebra and so on, so that I could finally understand Haskell code. I still don't understand Haskel…

> I still don't understand Haskell It's not you. Haskell has very bad syntax. It's not hard to understand it, it you rewrite the same things in something saner. Haskell was developed by people who enjoy one-liners and don't really need to write practical programs. Another aspect of Haskell is that it was written by people who were so misguided as to think that mathematical formulas are somehow superior to typical imp…

That's what (some) other people do. None of that stops you writing Haskell in whatever style you want, with meaningful variable names, curly braces and semicolons!

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#132

Post by lukan »

padthai wrote: post #120
lukan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandoc seems useful, but maybe "mass market" is a bit of an overstatement? And since many programmers like myself had to learn Haskell, I think Haskell should have a better head start and be in a better position, if it would be so useful for "real world" use cases. But please don't take this as an attack on haskell. I have nothing against the language, or its users and I did not suffered because of it in university,…

I am not a user of the language (although I learned it like you). I just came to chime in that (a) there is at least one very popular software written in Haskell and (b) Haskell seems to ship a good amount of software for its popularity. Haskell never got the “killer framework” like Rails or Spark that allowed to become more mainstream, even if it was teached in Universities all over the world.

"Haskell never got the “killer framework” like Rails or Spark that allowed to become more mainstream"

But why is that the case?

Thinking about writing a "killer framework" with huskell gives me a headache. Doing UI in huskell? Eventloop? Callbacks? Is that even possible, without doing awkward workarounds?

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#133

Post by trealira »

leononame wrote: post #16

Great 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.

"Programming in Haskell" by Graham Hutton has a few small text mode games in the second half of the book: Nim, Hangman, the game of life, and Tic-Tac-Toe; and it walks you through the minimax algorithm. The author also implements a solution to the countdown problem, which is hard to explain, so as an example, you're given a sequence of numbers [1, 3, 7, 10, 25, 50] and the target 765; a correct solution is (1+50)*(25-10).

The first half of the book is more geared towards a newbie to functional programming in general.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#134

Post by marcosdumay »

Valodim wrote: post #100
usgroup wrote: post #88

In my opinion, if you are after the mystical experience of understanding functional programming, you're better off learning Prolog. I think it has more to offer in terms of insight, because wrapping your head around the language only takes a couple days, but wrapping your head around its consequences is a gift which keeps on giving for quite some time. Immutable functional programming is basically what 80% of your Pr…

Prolog is a logic programming language though, I wouldn't expect it to have a lot of overlap with functional programming?

It's also biased into informal definitions, mixing side effects with logic, and encapsulating complex behavior together. It's way more biased into being a scripting language, while Haskell has all those biases pointed at being an application language.

So, I'd say that both languages lead people into very different programing styles.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#135

Post by czhu12 »

munchler wrote: post #2

Cute. All kidding aside, though, functional programming is worth the effort to learn, and it doesn't actually take 15 years. The payoff is at the end of the article: "It’s quite natural to program in Haskell by building a declarative model of your domain data, writing pure functions over that data, and interacting with the real world at the program’s boundaries. That’s my favorite way to work, Haskell or not." Haskel…

> doesn't require every single function to be pure

having never done F# or haskell, doesn't that start getting into the territory of languages that encourage functional programming like ruby or javascript (modern javascript)?

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#137

Post by anon291 »

cornel_io wrote: post #39
anon291 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically we don't but it's very rare to meet a programmer who understands these distinctions thats not also a great functional programmer. This is my experience after spending five years as a Haskell programmer and managing a Haskell team for several years and now moving back to the c++ world to play with AI. I know lots of good c++ programmers working on cutting edge stuff, real experts in their field, but they…

I've actually had to fire a technically exceptional Haskell programmer because of the damage they did to our C# codebase (and arguably moreso, the team). Sometimes it's not a matter of talent or skill, but culture fit. In my experience FP-aligned people on non-FP projects tend to be more likely to overengineer, more prone to argue in favor of the Great Rewrite For No Reason Except Aesthetics, and more likely to abuse…

I mean sure. Realistically, I'm certain I would do that if I were working on a typical code base, which is why I'm in an extremely niche field where that sort of thing is valued. From my extremely biased perspective, these are the 'hard' problems that need solving, versus the general run of the mill operational things. That probably sounds pretentious, but it takes skills for both.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#138

Post by cosmic_quanta »

TrackerFF wrote: post #12

What'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.

Pure functional programming doesn't preclude side-effects like IO; it makes side-effects explicit rather than implicit!

At my previous job, we used pure functional programming to ensure that custom programs only had access to certain side-effects (most importantly, not IO). This meant that it was trivial to run these custom programs in multiple environments, including various testing environments, and production.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#139

Post by cosmic_quanta »

mrkeen wrote: post #14
TrackerFF wrote: post #12

What'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.

This is all myth. People don't write Haskell, because they read why other non-Haskellers also don't write Haskell, based on what other non-Haskellers wrote. > a language which has adapted the best bits and pieces from the functional programming paradigm? Why write in a statically-typed language when dynamically-typed languages have adapted the best bits and pieces from statically-typed languages?

> Why write in a statically-typed language when dynamically-typed languages have adapted the best bits and pieces from statically-typed languages?

Unfortunately, dynamically-typed languages haven't adapted the best bit from statically-typed languages: that all types are enforced at compile-time!

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#140

Post by dllthomas »

pyuser583 wrote: post #109
sidkshatriya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes - the value of functional programming isn't that working in OCAML, or F#, or Haskell is 10x as productive as other languages. This is not true in my personal experience. As has been famously said (paraphrased): Functional programming makes tough problems easy and easy problems tough. In other words the value of functional programming depends on your domain.

How do you “Hello World” in a functional language? Doesn’t it have side effects?

It has an effect. Whether it's a "side effect" depends on how we've defined that.

One way of viewing Haskell is that you are lazily constructing the single composite "effect on the world" called main.

    helloWorld :: IO ()
then is a value representing an effect, but it only actually happens when it becomes a part of main.

Threads complicate this but don't completely destroy the model.

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