Why Not Haskell?
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Why Not Haskell?
1–10 of 134 posts
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#2I agree with the author, but still it reminds me of "Beating the average"
> This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#3Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use.
I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of functional programming. I just think pure functional programming is impractical. Mutable state is like radioactivity: it's necessary, powerful, and sometimes very useful, but must be handled with extreme care, not promiscuously thrown about.
My favored computation model is one in which the waterline between lambda and pi calculus is clear: message-passing between agents who should ideally be referentially transparent, unless referential non-transparency is part of their design. The upshot of this is that if an agent needs to be optimized using mutable state, none of the others care. That is, it's what OOP should have been.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#4The intro read like it would be a much longer article.
tl;dr - Haskell isn't easy enough to use / is lacking good toolchains for author's use cases
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#5My problem seems to be that despite desperately wanting to use Haskell for some decent sized project, it never seems to work out as my best option. Right now I'm interested in writing a metro styled app for win8, and even for the server side portions I feel like I'm better off just using CouchDB instead of any Haskell solution that I've seen so far. Before that it was yet-another-web-based-UI-library so my choices were pretty much coffeescript or javascript. Perhaps it's because I like to have fun with UI, but so far anything I'd like to actually spend time on -- Haskell just doesn't seem like the right tool for. My best use of it so far was solving project euler problems, and considering how much I liked it, it feels like a shame that I have nothing better to use it on.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#6My problem seems to be that despite desperately wanting to use Haskell for some decent sized project, it never seems to work out as my best option. Right now I'm interested in writing a metro styled app for win8, and even for the server side portions I feel like I'm better off just using CouchDB instead of any Haskell solution that I've seen so far. Before that it was yet-another-web-based-UI-library so my choices we…
That seems to be exactly what haskell is suited for solving, math problems. Which is great and wonderful when you are doing math related problems or things that are heavy in math but when you try and go outside those bounds that is when haskell becomes much much harder to write and work with. But alas that is both what makes haskell nice and hard to work with.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#7With the trend of SOA and webservers like Mongrel2, perhaps its a good time to start putting the more esoteric languages in production in the form of small services (w/ ZeroMQ for example).
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#8I like the shout out to go at the end. If you haven't tried that language yet I highly recommend it.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#9If the question is, should we use Haskell to solve this problem, or should we use JavaScript, I can't imagine that the answer is often Haskell. (Maybe if the question is, should we use OCaml or should we use Haskell...)
That said, what really came out of left field was the OP saying that he and his friends are more and more using Go.
Is Go adoption happening? I'd love to have a systems programming language that isn't C or C++, but I'd always assumed that Go was dead-on-arrival specifically because it wasn't C or C++.
Re: Why Not Haskell?
#10"If you've written a Haskell program that runs, it's highly likely to be a correct solution."
having done a bit of work with haskell myself, i'd say it's even better for this for haskell programmers. if you're using type signatures and you've written a haskell program that passes type-checking, it's highly likely to be a correct solution