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Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

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Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#91

Post by imanaccount247 »

cageface wrote: post #38
coldtea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of pandoc, I don't recall seeing anything particularly impressive from the Haskell camp. (Btw, this, actual stuff people use, is how I measure programming languages -- this metric takes into account communities, libraries, practical issues, etc all together, and ties them with practical results. It's my version of "let the market decide").

Darcs used to be the poster child for Haskell but then somebody came along and wrote a much better DVCS in C, of all languages. Draw your own conclusions...

A much worse DVCS, but written by a famous person.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#92

Post by rubiquity »

jbeja wrote: post #52
jeremiep wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xmonad also comes to mind. But you're talking more about products than programming languages. Haskell contributed a LOT to programming theory. Your every day coding is most likely using things coming directly from Haskell without you knowing it.

jQuery and Javascript Promises comes to mind, I know they started in C++ put they are practically Monads.

I think you mean one specific kind of a Monad.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#93

Post by imanaccount247 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #57
balloot wrote: post #26

I am increasingly convinced that Haskell only exists so that people who know it can pat themselves on the back for being wonderful.

Yeah, I've got a similar impression. The only 2 things I care about are 1) productivity (time to finish a task) 2) how pleasurable is it to use a language. And I just don't find Haskell (or Lisp) to be as productive as many would suggest, even if you adjust for matureness of the ecosystem. (Note: I have a moderate experience with Lisp, very little experience with Haskell and these days mostly program in Java, Julia a…

>I just don't find Haskell ... to be as productive as many would suggest

>I have ... very little experience with Haskell

So, how would you know?

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#94

Post by virtualwhys »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #45
stared wrote: post #25

It seems that it interchanges "productive" with "writing clean code". PHP is ugly but can be productive. Haskell is beautiful, but well, I know a lot of people encharmed by it, but no-one productive (i.e. delivering products quickly; it's not the same as solving pure, mathematical problems).

Do you know alot of Haskell programmers? Because I'm enjoying my typesafe SQL queries, typesafe intra-application linking, typesafe templating, etc. Haskell is capable of far more than "pure, mathematical problems"—indeed, typed IO is a premier feature of the language. edit: sorry, this was pretty defensive; I shouldn't have written this comment so hastily.

You know, C#/F# programmers are enjoying most of the above in spades, and the libraries are fully vetted and mature to boot; could say the same for Scala to some degree.

Can we say the same for Haskell? Let's take a sample: you say, "I'm enjoying my typesafe SQL queries"

There are 2 Haskell query DSLs worth talking about (read: that support joins): Esqueleto and OpalEye. The latter is fresh off the presses and not yet ready for prime time (see the "ideal sql" samples interspersed with the performance killing actual sql); the former at first blush looks decent, but then you realize, whoops, no string based SQL interface (for those ultra complex db-specific queries business requirements demand, but cannot be expressed in the dsl), and no Oracle or SQL Server support -- yikes, bye bye enterprise; in fact both libraries officially support one single database, Postgres.

Also, given Haskell's lack of a module system (hello global namespace conflicts), the choice of operators is somewhat, well, hideous (Haskell itself remains beautiful though, at least in terms of concision).

Not sure how things are on the web framework front, but given the claims of achieving C-like performance, that Yesod and Snap basically face plant in a popular benchmark[1], one wonders where reality and the ideal world Haskellers seem to live in, meet.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9&hw=pe...

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#95

Post by zapt02 »

imanaccount247 wrote: post #89
iSloth wrote: post #62

Really don't understand the pure hatred that people have for PHP, I'm at network engineer and I don't have any desire to become a programmer because I love my job, however I've wrote some very useful applications that myself and my team use on a daily basis to make networking easier for us. For me it was simple to learn PHP and create something 'useful', basically every web server is capable of running it which makes…

PHP is full of problems that lead directly to security vulnerabilities if you aren't constantly aware of them and very careful when writing your code. So when someone who doesn't know those problems (most people) "hacks together" something that "just works", it is almost always providing a backdoor into that server. Once you do learn a little, you find that every scripting language is just as easy to work with as PHP…

Does Perl, Python or Ruby have built-in automatic escaping and sanitization? I would not call PHP less safe than any of these languages.

On top of that all three of those languages require additional setup. (Especially Ruby with RoR shudder)

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#98

Post by frostmatthew »

coldtea wrote: post #27
frostmatthew wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook uses PHP This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_Virtual_Machine

> This is the common rebuttal of PHP jokes - but pointing to a sole outlier is rarely a solid defense. Sole outlier? Hardly. Half of the web is powered by PHP, including tons of websites with huge traffic and usage. > Especially when they have created Hack[1] and HHVM[2]. So it's not entirely accurate to say they "use PHP." Hack and HHVM do not show some inherent PHP issue that something like Ruby or Python would not…

> Sole outlier? Hardly. Half of the web is powered by PHP, including tons of websites with huge traffic and usage.

Quality > quantity (just because a language is widely used doesn't mean it's well designed), a huge amount of this quantity are WordPress blogs, MediaWiki sites, or relatively low traffic e-commerce sites. It is not the dominant language of "tons of websites with huge traffic and usage."[1] [Facebook and Wikipedia are the notable outliers...so I'll admit I shouldn't have said sole outlier]. The "quantity" argument is also weakened by the fact that websites are not the only things programming languages are used for, and in terms of overall popularity it's use is a fraction of that of C or Java.[2] PHP also has far less job openings than Java or C# and only slightly more than Python[3] (I imagine Python will eclipse PHP fairly soon).

If you're interested in why so many developers consider PHP a poorly designed language I'd suggest reading PHP: a fractal of bad design[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_...

[2] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

[3] https://gooroo.io/GoorooTHINK/Article/16191/Which-language-w...

[4] http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#99

Post by d23 »

xasos wrote: post #74
cmdkeen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rant (not by me) explains why[1]. PHP is full of gotchas, things that make security hard, and areas that are likely to break and be really hard to debug. There's definitely scope out there for a better effort to be made addressing the situation you raise, but PHP really shouldn't be the popular language that is is in that space. [1]: http://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

Sure it may be a fractal of bad design, but it's unfair to say it has no productivity value. You can write plenty good PHP code that actually accomplishes things. (And this is coming from someone that hates PHP)

I think you're setting up a strawman. The arguments against it are numerous, but I've never seen anyone say it has no productivity value.

Re: Learning Curves for Different Programming Languages

#100

Post by mikegioia »

jbeja wrote: post #80
RivieraKid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've got a similar impression. The only 2 things I care about are 1) productivity (time to finish a task) 2) how pleasurable is it to use a language. And I just don't find Haskell (or Lisp) to be as productive as many would suggest, even if you adjust for matureness of the ecosystem. (Note: I have a moderate experience with Lisp, very little experience with Haskell and these days mostly program in Java, Julia a…

"I have a moderate experience with Lisp, very little experience with Haskell and these days mostly program in Java, Julia and Python" I despise that people give their 2 cents for something they haven't experienced much.

You mean like everyone in this thread who has never written PHP but feels the need to bash it?
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