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When Haskell Is Not faster than C

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Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#11

Post by Swizec »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

Two things I love about Haskell.

1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple.

2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction.

That said, I rarely get to use Haskell. For most of my tasks javascript is better suited, but haskell has affected how I write javascript to a great extent.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#12

Post by pjmlp »

benbataille wrote: post #6

Could everyone on HN just take a course in languages theory so we can all stop with these stupid trolls about the best languages which have been emerging for a week. Hopefully it would allow everyone to realize that a language is just some syntax and semantic and that a compiler is just a program like another. Nothing sacred here. Hell you can even do imperative programming in Haskell if you wish. Coding an interpret…

It amazes me how bad developers seem to be prepared nowadays in compiler design and language theory.

Back in the day we were able to understand that language and implementation are separate concepts. As well as why certain languages had a specific implementation as the default one.

Now young developers seems to think language and implementation are the same thing.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#13

Post by Peaker »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

When you find a tool that in many ways is far better than every other tool used by the mainstream (and of course in some ways worse) you might get excited about it so you want to share the knowledge you found.

Or maybe you prefer the tool you like to get more adoption so you could use it in more situations.

I advocate Haskell because of those two reasons. I think that like me, many others can get enormous educational and practical benefits from learning Haskell and I'd really rather be using Haskell than e.g Python.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#14

Post by VeejayRampay »

friendly_chap wrote: post #7
VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

> wondering why no one will play with him That's kind of a strong statement about a language which has approx. 1000 users in it's IRC chatroom.

The number of people present in the IRC channel is more of a sign that they have a very engaged and active community, which is a good sign for the language itself, for sure, but doesn't necessarily correlate to the general adoption of Haskell as a whole.

A measure like http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (by no means a perfect one, quite like speed benchmarks ironically) seems to indicate that Haskell still has a long way to go before reaching "mainstream adoption". But you're right about that statement, it was intended more as a humorous jab than a statement of absolute truth :)

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#15

Post by VeejayRampay »

Peaker wrote: post #13
VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

When you find a tool that in many ways is far better than every other tool used by the mainstream (and of course in some ways worse) you might get excited about it so you want to share the knowledge you found. Or maybe you prefer the tool you like to get more adoption so you could use it in more situations. I advocate Haskell because of those two reasons. I think that like me, many others can get enormous educational…

Tons of other languages and programming styles can provide the same benefits. It doesn't have to be Haskell against Python or C++ against Erlang. We can pick, mix and match and let the best of the bunch naturally emerge.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#16

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Swizec wrote: post #11
VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

Two things I love about Haskell. 1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple. 2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction. That said, I rarel…

You have expressed something I have been worrying about with all these new APIs and frameworks - there is a joy to coding not necessarily connected to delivering business value.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#17

Post by sharpneli »

I ran into similar issue few years ago where lack of knowledge combined with large amount of fanboyism clouded someones mind. In a popular language comparisons site there was a threading benchmark. It was simple, just start 256 threads. Haskell beat C by far.

I did strace. The C benchmark actually spawned 256 threads and the Haskell one spawned 4. The response I got was that it's a builtin feature in Haskell that it uses lightweight threads internally. And because pthread doesn't do that you cannot do it in C and therefore the comparison is valid. Even though C doesn't have the concept of threading and everything must be done with an external library in anycase.

I could dig the old thread up but I've given up with those. I have nothing against high level languages, I use them a lot. However I find it very weird that some true fans feel the need of creating enormously biased benchmarks and then being proud that those benchmarks show that their favourite language is the best.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#18

Post by benbataille »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #9
benbataille wrote: post #6

Could everyone on HN just take a course in languages theory so we can all stop with these stupid trolls about the best languages which have been emerging for a week. Hopefully it would allow everyone to realize that a language is just some syntax and semantic and that a compiler is just a program like another. Nothing sacred here. Hell you can even do imperative programming in Haskell if you wish. Coding an interpret…

I'm trying to translate what you are saying. All languages are Turing complete, so it doesn't matter? Do you program in assembly language then? I mean, if it doesn't matter....

> All languages are Turing complete, so it doesn't matter?

Precisely. The whole "my language is better" argument is completely void. Syntax is mostly a matter of preference. Semantic will make the structure of your program different but in the end there is no actual difference on what you can do only on how you will do it. Once again it mostly boils down to preference.

If you really need to argue about something go for my compiler/optimisation pass is better that at least does make sense. Note that there is no theoretical bound preventing an Haskell compiler to generate code equally fast than the one of a C compiler for any program.

> Do you program in assembly language then?

I did when I had to (quite a long time ago). While languages don't matter, compilers do when you need efficiency. While enjoying ML-based languages more, I also did some C. As I stated before, C compilers are better. Well, I even used my own little syntax-extension of C for a moment (if you don't have to share the code, you can do whatever you want with it).

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#19

Post by throwa »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #16
Swizec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things I love about Haskell. 1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple. 2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction. That said, I rarel…

You have expressed something I have been worrying about with all these new APIs and frameworks - there is a joy to coding not necessarily connected to delivering business value.

Joy is relative. What gives one person Joy might not give another joy. There just might be people who derive joy using frameworks to deliver business value who might not find joy in coding just for coding sake. For some programming is there hobby and doubles as work, so they derive joy in coding for coding sake. For other's coding is just a means to an end in their work and they have other hobbies.

So every man to what gives him joy and no need to worry about those using Api's and framework to deliver value and pay bills.

Re: When Haskell Is Not faster than C

#20

Post by sold »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #5

I still wonder to this day why Haskell programmers want their language to be loved so much. At times it feels like that kid at the playground that spends half his time telling everyone how he's the best thing since sliced bread and cries himself to sleep at night wondering why no one will play with him and his monads. Don't get me wrong, Haskell looks like a great language with obvious qualities and I don't knock any…

It's different. It's like you were listening to one music genre all your life and there's suddenly something new.

If, say, Python was the only language with "for(each)" loops, you'd see many blog posts about that too. After I saw this, the old style of iterating by index feels so antiquated. Haskell gives the same feeling many times. It has unique features when it comes to abstraction and I feel they are the right way to program.

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