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I learned Haskell in just 15 years

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Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#151

Post by freedomben »

Skinney wrote: post #25
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.

> What's the benefit of learning a PURE functional programming language 1. It makes it easy to learn how to structure a program in a pure way, which is hard to do in languages that offers you a easy way out. 2. Since "everything" is pure, writing tests is easier. 3. You know for certain that if you discard the result of a function call, all the side-effects that it would normally trigger would be stopped as well. 4.…

Agree with all the reasons, but number 1 is really the most important:

> 1. It makes it easy to learn how to structure a program in a pure way, which is hard to do in languages that offers you a easy way out.

When there's an escape hatch, you will reach for it at some point. It helps with getting things done, but you never end up really confronting the hard things when you have that, and the hard things are an important part of the learning/benefit.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#153

Post by cubefox »

dboreham wrote: post #101
cubefox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mathematics is just a kind of programming. And vice versa.

Programs fundamentally have state, while mathematical equations have not. Math is in its core declarative, while programming is essentially imperative, at least under the hood.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#154

Post by chipdart »

mrkeen wrote: post #92
chipdart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is "emphasizes" just another word for second-class support? I don't know what's your personal definition of "second-class support" but what it means is that it's explicitly supported by the language.

C++ explicitly supports memory-safe programming. You can choose whether you want to mess around with raw pointer arithmetic. What safeguards does the language actually put in-place?

> C++ explicitly supports memory-safe programming. You can choose whether you want to mess around with raw pointer arithmetic.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Managing object ownership through systems like smart pointers is not memory safety. Applications that use smart pointers still suffer from memory issues, and it's possible to adopt object ownership systems that still use raw pointers, such as It's object ownership system.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#155

Post by agentultra »

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…

You knew Paul Hudak, Simon Peyton Jones, Phil Wadler, etc? Were they thinking about the benefits of mathematical formulas over program counters and procedural keywords when designing Haskell?

I was under the impression from the History of Haskell [0] that they were interested in unifying research into lazy evaluation of functional programming languages.

> This makes no sense, and is, in fact, very harmful when writing real-world programs,

Gosh, what am I doing with my life? I must have made up all those programs I wrote on my stream, the ones I use to maintain my website, and all the boring line-of-business code I write at work. /s

In all seriousness, Haskell has its warts, but being impractical isn't one of them. To some purists the committee has been overly pragmatic with the design of the language. As far as functional programming languages go it's pretty hairy. You have "pure" functions in the base libraries that can throw runtime exceptions when given the wrong values for their arguments (ie: the infamous head function). Bottom, a special kind of null value, is a member of every type. There exist functions to escape the type system entirely that are used with some frequency to make things work. The committee has gone back more than once to reshape the type-class hierarchy much to the chagrin of the community of maintainers who had to manually patch old code or risk having it not longer compile on new versions of the base libraries. These are all hairy, pragmatic trade-offs the language and ecosystem designers and maintainers have had to make... because people write software using this language to solve problems they have and they have to maintain these systems.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#156

Post by grumpyprole »

initplus wrote: post #8
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.

Maybe my phrasing is not clear - I meant that these languages are indeed not significantly more productive.

By what measure? Haskell can be a huge productivity multiplier. The standard library is built upon many powerful, unifying and consistent mathematical abstractions. For example, there is almost no boilerplate to write for any traversal, mapping, error handling etc. The average Pythonista simply has no idea what they are missing. But Haskell doesn't have anywhere near the third party ecosystem of Python, so is less productive by some measures.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#157

Post by agentultra »

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.

There's a video game on steam you can buy with real dollars built in Haskell.

I work full-time writing Haskell. Fintech stuff. No shiny research going on here.

I've written some libraries and programs on my stream in Haskell. One is a client library for Postgres' streaming logical replication protocol. I've written a couple of games. Working on learning how to do wave function collapse.

Believe it or not, functional programmers -- even ones writing Haskell -- often think about and deliver software for "real world," use.

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#158

Post by SkyMarshal »

jerf wrote: post #99
wruza wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

In theory, you could pick up your one language, say, Java, and through the course of a normal career learn everything necessary to program in that language in the best possible way. In practice, it's a pretty well-known phenomenon experienced by many skilled programmers that being forced into different styles by different languages results in learning things that you would only have learned very slowly if you had stu…

> FP has more to say about purity of functions, the utility of composition of small parts, the flexibility of composition with small parts, ways to wrap parts of the program that can't be handled that way, and providing an existence proof that despite what an imperative programmer might think it is in fact possible to program this way at a system architecture level.

Adding to that, in my case it also made realize that deterministic elimination of entire classes of errors in large, complex code bases, in a systematic rather than ad-hoc way, is actually possible. Prior to discovering fp, and particularly Haskell's type system, I spent much effort trying to do that with a combination of TDD and increasingly elaborate try/catch/throw error handling. Discovering Haskell's compiler, type system, and monadic quarantining of effects obsoleted all that effort and was a huge eye opener for me. And a nice side-effect is easy, reliable refactor-ability. Being able to apply those concepts to imperative and other programming paradigms is where the real value in fp is, imho. Programmers still wrangling with the Tarpit [1] need to take a look if they haven't already.

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34954126

Re: I learned Haskell in just 15 years

#160

Post by amoss »

jiggawatts wrote: post #45
antonvs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easy problems tough. That needs a qualifier: it can make easy problems tough if you're not familiar with how to solve them in a functional context. A big part of that is because smart people have already solved the tough problems and made them available as language features or libraries.

Absolutely! Any beginner can readily combine the catamorphisms and anamorphisms in `recursion-schemes`, or use the ready-made hylomorphisms for common tasks such as setting a value in a data structure. What could be simpler? /s https://wiki.haskell.org/Zygohistomorphic_prepromorphisms

They have played us for absolute fools.
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