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After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

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Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#101

Post by pianopatrick »

tonyarkles wrote: post #77
zeendo wrote: post #60

I am surprised by this take, honestly. We're a Haskell shop (and have been for over 10 years now) and are finding agentic development with Haskell to work pretty damn well. Cold compile times in Haskell are painful indeed. Our development practices don't really cause us to do that much - even with agents. It's unclear to me if the development practices at Scarf that cause them to hit this pain often are worth it if i…

Speaking as someone who has tried Haskell but hasn’t ever really gotten into it, but spends all day with a C++ codebase that also has long cold-compile times… I think the author of the post said they’re using git worktrees to be able to have multiple agents working on different things at the same time without stepping on each others’ toes. I’ve started experimenting with that myself and it’s great in a lot of ways bu…

Just spit balling: could you have the agent pre warm the cache as part of your workflow? Like at the start of working on the code have the agent run a compile in the background. That way when the agent is ready to "really" compile there is a warm cache

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#103

Post by tonyarkles »

pianopatrick wrote: post #101
tonyarkles wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has tried Haskell but hasn’t ever really gotten into it, but spends all day with a C++ codebase that also has long cold-compile times… I think the author of the post said they’re using git worktrees to be able to have multiple agents working on different things at the same time without stepping on each others’ toes. I’ve started experimenting with that myself and it’s great in a lot of ways bu…

Just spit balling: could you have the agent pre warm the cache as part of your workflow? Like at the start of working on the code have the agent run a compile in the background. That way when the agent is ready to "really" compile there is a warm cache

Probably not a bad idea for just making sure that you’re starting from a buildable tree anyway!

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#104

Post by hunterpayne »

pessimizer wrote: post #90
voidhorse wrote: post #21

"Hammers are now a very popular tool, and one can move quickly building exclusively with hammers, so we have decided to construct buildings strictly using nails, no more screws, bolts, or any other kind of fastener shall be used going forward."

You say this as if it were necessarily irrational. Clothes became chain-stitched (and later lock-stitched) because machines could chain-stitch. If there were a super-efficient hammering machine, it could be better to figure out ways to use nails to replace screws in designs than to hold onto screws just for nostalgia's sake.

"If there were a super-efficient hammering machine, it could be better to figure out ways to use nails to replace screws in designs than to hold onto screws just for nostalgia's sake."

How about for the sake of the bridge continuing to stand? Or is that not a good enough reason for the accountants?

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#105

Post by em-bee »

hunterpayne wrote: post #98
em-bee wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious, can you point to more details to what happened with scala3?

Just to put it in perspective, most Scala programmers rejected Scala3 before it was even written. The Scala team, in their infinite wisdom with a collective 2 years of professional programming under their belt knew better. Nobody switched and Scala2 has been slowly dying with their neglect ever since. PS The Scala team should have been fixing their type inference engine which lacked some important features and needed…

wait, how did the scala team end up with only 2 years of professional programming experience? did the original developers all leave?

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#107

Post by Barrin92 »

I'm honestly baffled that someone who has been writing software for so long puts so much emphasis on code generation as a meaningful metric. As Fred Brooks taught us, conceptual unity, not lines of code is the most important metric for the long term health of a software project.

It's interesting in particular because the argument of the article has at its core nothing to do with coding agents:

"so far, we haven’t lost much in the switch. The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better."

people said the exact same thing when they moved from Haskell to Python or to JavaScript before the latest tech. Tests, tests, tests, and faster development cycles is just the language of the Agile people who have been advocating for this for decades. The people who didn't buy it never did so because the claims about development speed were wrong, they didn't buy it because they had a fundamentally different outlook about what matters in a codebase over years. I'm interested to see how this will look in three years rather than three weeks. If you're so seduced by the idea that shipping next months feature faster is so important I honestly don't know why you ever chose Haskell in the first place.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#108

Post by newaccountman2 »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

I general I agree with you. I think expressive type systems are superior, and they are even better in the LLM era.

I would quibble though that Python's is actually pretty good at this point, and, despite what the below poster is saying, straight-forward to set up and use. I am still perplexed that the author chose Python over Rust or Scala or TypeScript though, especially given they presumably want to migrate a Haskell codebase.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#109

Post by jbritton »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #82
jbritton wrote: post #80

I write a ton of Python code. Modifying code without static types is difficult and error prone. If a function needs a new argument, all the callers have to pass it and all of their callers recursively. Maybe the calling function is just a function pointer that has been passed around and not searchable. I love Python for small tasks and tasks that are not critical if they fail.

I also write a lot of python code. Ported 2 companies from python 2 to 3 too (idk why that keeps happening to me). Lots of modern (...3+) python code uses type hints and a type checker. It can be as strict as you'd like it to be, which is exactly how I like it. It's what pulled me away from ruby. Meanwhile, static languages are too often a giant pain in the ass, and in return for writing a lot of annoying code, you g…

Well said.

Re: After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell

#110

Post by dionian »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Wow. Not a Haskell user, but a big user of other languages with expressive type systems (mostly Scala; some Rust). My experience is the complete opposite. I can't imagine using a language without a good type system to catch all the junk the LLM produces. In fact I thought people would move away from languages from poor type systems, like Python, given the cost of using languages with expressive type systems has decre…

I have worked extensively with FP and non FP codebases with LLM. I find my highly type safe FP code works really really well with LLMs
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