Is Haskell the Cure?
mathias-biilmann.net
Is Haskell the Cure?
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#2Hasn't the author already said that the measuring of Fibonacci was not the point of his tirade? Which makes the line in this post 'I think a lot of people missed the main point of Dziuba's troll" slightly amusing. Is there now going to be someone running this 'benchmark' in whatever language they can? One of the blogs already posted said he's going to find time to run it in C.
I'll do my part. Delphi, here I come. ;)
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#3[deleted]
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#4Hasn't the author already said that the measuring of Fibonacci was not the point of his tirade? Which makes the line in this post 'I think a lot of people missed the main point of Dziuba's troll" slightly amusing. Is there now going to be someone running this 'benchmark' in whatever language they can? One of the blogs already posted said he's going to find time to run it in C. I'll do my part. Delphi, here I come. ;)
I'm not interested in this Fibonacci benchmark until someone does it in TriINTERCAL.
PLEASE GIVE UP
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#5Hasn't the author already said that the measuring of Fibonacci was not the point of his tirade? Which makes the line in this post 'I think a lot of people missed the main point of Dziuba's troll" slightly amusing. Is there now going to be someone running this 'benchmark' in whatever language they can? One of the blogs already posted said he's going to find time to run it in C. I'll do my part. Delphi, here I come. ;)
My benchmark was mostly a parody, since Haskell just memoized the call and never really did the work.
The point of the article was more the difference between the languages that really tackles concurrency (Haskell, Clojure, Go, Erlang) and Node's way of simply offering one solution that works for a lot of problems where the common scripting languages (especially PHP) doesn't work that well.
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#6It is somewhat of a shame that learning curve plays such a significant role for career programmers.
You would expect that people that spend years and years working with their tools would be willing to put a few weeks or months into learning their most important tool: the programming language. It seems most programmers get frustrated and abandon learning of different programming paradigms very quickly.
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#7It is somewhat of a shame that learning curve plays such a significant role for career programmers. You would expect that people that spend years and years working with their tools would be willing to put a few weeks or months into learning their most important tool: the programming language. It seems most programmers get frustrated and abandon learning of different programming paradigms very quickly.
Maybe most programmers who bother to look up different paradigms. My experience is that most programmers overall aren't even aware of different paradigms, let alone that things could be better: they're taught what they're taught in school or at home and don't move beyond. I've heard the phrase "Well if you know C++ you know it all" at least three times.
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#8I love Haskell; I do a lot of work with it. That said, I use Python for the web. As nice as Snap is, Haskell just doesn't have the vast array of quality libraries for web development that Python does. Lately, this means that I do web development in Flask, and heavy lifting in Haskell.
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#9Hasn't the author already said that the measuring of Fibonacci was not the point of his tirade? Which makes the line in this post 'I think a lot of people missed the main point of Dziuba's troll" slightly amusing. Is there now going to be someone running this 'benchmark' in whatever language they can? One of the blogs already posted said he's going to find time to run it in C. I'll do my part. Delphi, here I come. ;)
My benchmark was mostly a parody, since Haskell just memoized the call and never really did the work. The point of the article was more the difference between the languages that really tackles concurrency (Haskell, Clojure, Go, Erlang) and Node's way of simply offering one solution that works for a lot of problems where the common scripting languages (especially PHP) doesn't work that well.
Haskell broke the Programming Language Shootout by the compiler and runtime optimizing the busy-loop tasks into no-ops and memoizations.
It is hard to write a Haskell program that is gimped enough to be in league with other languages in a synthetic benchmark.
Re: Is Haskell the Cure?
#10I gave haskell a shot as some of my earlier github repos indicate: https://github.com/substack. I even wrote my blog in haskell with happstack, since snap hadn't gotten popular yet.
Haskell is very hard, but even after 3 years of pretty intensive use, I never really felt productive with haskell in the same way that I've felt in other languages. Anything I did in haskell required a lot of thinking up-front and tinkering in the REPL to make sure the types all agreed and it was rather time-consuming to assemble a selection of data types and functions that mapped adequately onto the problem I was trying to solve. More often than not, the result was something of an unsightly jumble that would take a long time to convert into nicer-looking code or to make an API less terrible to use.
I built an underwater ROV control system in haskell in 2010 which went well enough, but I had to tinker with the RTS scheduling constantly to keep the more processor-hungry threads from starving out the other ones for CPU. The system worked, but I had no idea what horrors GHC was performing on my behalf.
Later I built the first prototype of my startup with haskell, but the sheer volume of things that I didn't know kept getting in the way of getting stuff done in a reasonable time frame. Then we started to incrementally phase out haskell in favor of node.
I write a lot of node.js now and it's really nice. The whole runtime system easily fits into my head all at once and the execution model is simple and predictable. I can also spend more time writing and testing software and less time learning obscure theories so that the libraries and abstractions I use make sense.
The point in the article about haskell being "too clever for this benchmark" sums up haskell generally in my experience.