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State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

haskellforall.com

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Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#11

Post by rjayatilleka »

phamilton wrote: post #9
rifung wrote: post #4

> The rating of the "Educational" section still remains "Immature" until this book is out of Early Access and finally released, but once the book is out I will finally mark Haskell as having "Mature" educational resources. I haven't read the book myself, but is the book really so good that we can go from "Immature" to "Mature" with the release of just one book? I find that to be a bit strange considering Haskell is a…

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

Did you switch that up? Learn You a Haskell is excellent for beginners. The intermediate space is the gap.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#12

Post by akurilin »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

Would be interesting to know what you found to be the very negative 10%, maybe we can help.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#13

Post by coolsunglasses »

phamilton wrote: post #9
rifung wrote: post #4

> The rating of the "Educational" section still remains "Immature" until this book is out of Early Access and finally released, but once the book is out I will finally mark Haskell as having "Mature" educational resources. I haven't read the book myself, but is the book really so good that we can go from "Immature" to "Mature" with the release of just one book? I find that to be a bit strange considering Haskell is a…

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

Hi, I'm a coauthor of the book mentioned in the State of the Union post.

The beginner parts were _a_ gap, but they weren't the only gap. In fact, none of the existing books really went very far beyond Monad, with only RWH covering monad transformers.

So, part of the appeal of the book isn't just that we cover beginner topics better, we cover _everything_ from beginner to intermediate/advanced that you're likely to apply in order to, say, make a web application. And in fact, we use a micro web framework in Haskell to demonstrate stuff in the later chapters.

It may not seem like it, because chapters like "data structures" actually cover - profiling time, profiling memory, containers, benchmarking, constant applicative forms, avoiding memory leaks, etc.

We'll be updating the site to explain what each chapter covers in more detail soon.

I've spent a couple years teaching Haskell and haven't found LYAH to set anyone up for success in Haskell. They usually hit a brick wall because they don't have either the foundation or intermediate idioms to really get anywhere. So there's usually a 45-days-in-the-desert period after LYAH where they have to muck through tens or hundreds of blog posts to plug all the gaps.

I talk about this here: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...

Suffice to say, I would've happily written a much smaller, shorter book - but this was needed.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#14

Post by kyllo »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language?

It already is. If you are talking about a full stack web application, there are several fully featured production quality frameworks, Yesod being the most popular.

What are the negatives to you? Long compile times? Monadic IO? Memory leaks from lazy eval?

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#15

Post by sseveran »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

I use it as a fullstack language at work. I bumped into the 10% when I was a beginner, but no more.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#16

Post by etcinit »

melling wrote: post #3

It sounds like tooling has improved but it's still the biggest hurdle for beginners: "Improving IDE support is the single easiest way to lower the entry barrier to newcomers."

I think stack has helped in that area. As a beginner, I found stack's ability to create a new project from a template very useful when getting started with projects.

The plugins for vim and Atom do a really good job for auto-completion and showing linter/compiler warnings, but they are a bit hard to setup initially.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#17

Post by tathougies »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app (http://sostenoto.com). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol.

Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you wouldn't be using Haskell for server-side web development.

No other popular server-side language supports concurrency (see STM, MVar's, and Chans), transparent futures/promises for I/O (the entire IO monad in GHC is non-blocking), support for multiple processors (Just add +RTS -N to make your program scale to n processors), and a blazing fast HTTP server (warp).

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#18

Post by xiphias »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #13
phamilton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

Hi, I'm a coauthor of the book mentioned in the State of the Union post. The beginner parts were _a_ gap, but they weren't the only gap. In fact, none of the existing books really went very far beyond Monad, with only RWH covering monad transformers. So, part of the appeal of the book isn't just that we cover beginner topics better, we cover _everything_ from beginner to intermediate/advanced that you're likely to ap…

I think the problem with Haskell is that you need to be on the advanced level to be able to write a web app. Every beginner PHP coder can throw a website together, it shouldn't be harder than that in a higher level language, but it still is.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#19

Post by bloaf »

etcinit wrote: post #16
melling wrote: post #3

It sounds like tooling has improved but it's still the biggest hurdle for beginners: "Improving IDE support is the single easiest way to lower the entry barrier to newcomers."

I think stack has helped in that area. As a beginner, I found stack's ability to create a new project from a template very useful when getting started with projects. The plugins for vim and Atom do a really good job for auto-completion and showing linter/compiler warnings, but they are a bit hard to setup initially.

And they graduate from "a bit hard" to "downright painful" if you want to do it in windows. The consequences of doing it wrong can be severe[1].

[1] https://github.com/atom-haskell/ide-haskell/issues/83

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#20

Post by lvh »

kyllo wrote: post #14
dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? It already is. If you are talking about a full stack web application, there are several fully featured production quality frameworks, Yesod being the most popular. What are the negatives to you? Long compile times? Monadic IO? Memory leaks from lazy eval?

I'm guessing the poster included being able to do front-end work in Haskell. elm and purescript might be plausible front-end languages, but ghcjs isn't really there yet.
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