Yes, Haskell started as a pure academic endeavour. In fact I think the creators tried very hard not to compromise on its pure Math-y focus. But that exactly contributed to its success (ironic). I see Haskell being used by Big tech as well.
Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
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Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#12With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd love to read someone's decision postmortem that goes something like 'Here is a problem we were looking to solve. And here is how specific features A/B/C of Haskell helped us solve it well.…
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Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#13With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd love to read someone's decision postmortem that goes something like 'Here is a problem we were looking to solve. And here is how specific features A/B/C of Haskell helped us solve it well.…
>But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare From my (limited) experience with Haskell, my impression is that it's strongest in domains that map _very_ well to formal mathematical models. Mathematical computation is an obvious example, but things like programming language parsers are also really intuitive to build in Haskell. My experience trying to use Haskell f…
Thanks for writing about that experience, makes sense. My first to forays in the language ended the same way. I tried to do mainstream programming stuff in it but realised I wasn't making much progress in first few days and eventually moved on.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#14With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd love to read someone's decision postmortem that goes something like 'Here is a problem we were looking to solve. And here is how specific features A/B/C of Haskell helped us solve it well.…
> But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare.
There isn't much that only one programming language can do, so it's not fair to ask for this. The benefits of using Haskell over other programming languages are that it's easier to reason about code in it, and you can have more assurance that code is correct.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#15With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd love to read someone's decision postmortem that goes something like 'Here is a problem we were looking to solve. And here is how specific features A/B/C of Haskell helped us solve it well.…
I may get some flak for this but Haskell still being called a research language is doing Haskell a huge disservice for adoption. The new ideas of Haskell are now old and well-known in programming languages research for over a decade. Seeing Haskell as a research language causes the community, by and large, to remain in an academic-mindset. But what the Haskell community needs now is an engineering-mindset. I think Doctor_Ryner in the OP states it perfectly:
“In other communities people mostly discuss regular production problems and data structures, while in a Haskell chat people discuss monads, applicative functors, crazy types and things like that.”
This is why use cases and how only Haskell enabled solving it are rare.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#16There are two issues that are really hard to articulate in a language critique:
1) There is no easy way to learn the language. Try explaining that without looking ignorant.
2) The software written in this language is too hard to read and understand.
Do either of these problems manifest in Haskell? No idea. But I've seen them manifest in other systems and once I know about them suddenly there is an obvious and suspicious silence of people talking about clear problems. When a group of developers see something they don't understand they go quiet because it is hard to tell if the thing is inherently too hard or if the developer themselves just doesn't get it.
Happens a bit in the lisps, I think. There isn't any privileged syntax for loops and conditionals so there are no hints about what control flow constructs to use. People aren't about to stand up and say they don't really understand what control structures are should be used when. They'd just look silly. So the topic doesn't get a lot of discussion despite being important & people go use languages where loop statements get special syntax.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#17With Haskell, one always finds articles explaining how great it is, how its features (pure functionality) lend to correct code. But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare. I'd love to read someone's decision postmortem that goes something like 'Here is a problem we were looking to solve. And here is how specific features A/B/C of Haskell helped us solve it well.…
I may get some flak for this but Haskell still being called a research language is doing Haskell a huge disservice for adoption. The new ideas of Haskell are now old and well-known in programming languages research for over a decade. Seeing Haskell as a research language causes the community, by and large, to remain in an academic-mindset. But what the Haskell community needs now is an engineering-mindset. I think Do…
I suspect that the community is overall quite happy with increased adoption being a non-goal. That is, it does not need to shift to an engineering-mindset because it does not value the consequences of that shift.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But, articles explaining the core use cases and how only this language enabled solving it are rare From my (limited) experience with Haskell, my impression is that it's strongest in domains that map _very_ well to formal mathematical models. Mathematical computation is an obvious example, but things like programming language parsers are also really intuitive to build in Haskell. My experience trying to use Haskell f…
Thanks for writing about that experience, makes sense. My first to forays in the language ended the same way. I tried to do mainstream programming stuff in it but realised I wasn't making much progress in first few days and eventually moved on.
It sounds like you folks didn't give the language enough of a chance and may have felt the friction of trying to write Haskell in the style of another language. It takes a while to learn how to go with the grain, in any language.
While I totally sympathize with this, I'm not sure it's a very good vantage point from which to judge a language.
Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#19Yes, Haskell started as a pure academic endeavour. In fact I think the creators tried very hard not to compromise on its pure Math-y focus. But that exactly contributed to its success (ironic). I see Haskell being used by Big tech as well.
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Re: Is Haskell really the language of geniuses and academia? (2019)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for writing about that experience, makes sense. My first to forays in the language ended the same way. I tried to do mainstream programming stuff in it but realised I wasn't making much progress in first few days and eventually moved on.
It sounds like you folks didn't give the language enough of a chance and may have felt the friction of trying to write Haskell in the style of another language. It takes a while to learn how to go with the grain, in any language. While I totally sympathize with this, I'm not sure it's a very good vantage point from which to judge a language.
Which goes back to the root comment and the issue it raised:
Where are the practical Haskell tutorials. No preaching, no "you're holding it wrong", ONLY this: "you need to handle arbitrarily nested JSON? here's how".