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Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

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11–20 of 36 posts

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#11
post #3

I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml consultancy; many former OCaml fans, myself included, discovered Haskell as "that language that's like OCaml but better".) Rather than downvote his posts or comments to oblivion, I recommend reading it all with a lot of skepticism. For one example, he claims it…

What makes Haskell better than OCaml in your experience? I haven't heard of much real world evidence of Haskell being better, just people saying things like it must be better because of its monads.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#12
post #9
post #4

I don't mean to be cruel, but Haskell is simply not a good language for 2012. It feels like I'm programming for 1983, with the poor syntax and silly idioms. There's a reason that eight out of the ten top programming languages in use today are C or C descendants - C is a great language to read and write, and for 90% of programming tasks (and 99.9% of business programming tasks), how easy it is for the programmer to co…

Really? I've found Haskell's syntax and overall design to be the most elegant of anything I've tried. I really appreciate the lack of unnecessary punctuation which litters other languages.

I can understand the sentiment. I was a Lisper before I came to Haskell, and initially, the syntax seemed verbose and unnecessary. As it turns out though, the syntax is very simple and well designed. There's just a lot of optional sugar, which also happens to be well designed.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#13
post #4

I don't mean to be cruel, but Haskell is simply not a good language for 2012. It feels like I'm programming for 1983, with the poor syntax and silly idioms. There's a reason that eight out of the ten top programming languages in use today are C or C descendants - C is a great language to read and write, and for 90% of programming tasks (and 99.9% of business programming tasks), how easy it is for the programmer to co…

This is the first time I see someone seriously dismiss, and choose, a programming language based solely on its syntax. Also the first time I see one to pretend Haskell makes it more difficult to express oneself because of the syntax.

Surely, you were talking about the comments syntax. They really make it horrible to express anything.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#14
post #6
post #4

I don't mean to be cruel, but Haskell is simply not a good language for 2012. It feels like I'm programming for 1983, with the poor syntax and silly idioms. There's a reason that eight out of the ten top programming languages in use today are C or C descendants - C is a great language to read and write, and for 90% of programming tasks (and 99.9% of business programming tasks), how easy it is for the programmer to co…

C and C descendants happen to be the primary reason we have not really moved forward any further than where we are right now. To build a mildly succesful C application, you needs lots and lots of code. The question is: Does it necessarily have to be so? Haskell as a language is far more advanced and your "feel" might actually be right: You are now programming in the 80'es rather than the 70'es which most C-descendant…

To build a mildly successful C#, JavaScript, Java, Perl, or PHP application, you need very little code, and all of these languages are vastly more popular than Haskell because it is orders of magnitude easier to get things done in those languages compared to Haskell.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of hand-waving here. Do you realize that C syntax predates 1983? Can you explain what it is about Haskell syntax that irks you? Can you provide examples of silly idioms?

The C syntax predates 1983, but it works. Haskell's operators are wonk: [0,1,2,3]!!2 versus: [0,1,2,3][2] Clearly !! is a logical array indexing operator.

You can define your own operator, if you want to.

There are legitimate gripes you can have about Haskell syntax, but this is just trolling.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#16
post #3

I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml consultancy; many former OCaml fans, myself included, discovered Haskell as "that language that's like OCaml but better".) Rather than downvote his posts or comments to oblivion, I recommend reading it all with a lot of skepticism. For one example, he claims it…

The OP is clearly a troll. The question remains interesting, though.

My theory is that Haskell has a lot of usability problems. A programming language is a UI for programmers. Usability issues are always a sufficient explanation for market disappointments in any product or field.

Most notably, Haskell is rooted in a theoretical foundation that's essentially a major subfield of 20th-century mathematics, using concepts and notations which most programmers (a) do not understand, (b) do not want to understand, (c) do not need to understand, and (d) in many cases are not physically capable of understanding (eg, they have IQs As "LYAH" demonstrates, it's possible to teach programmers (or at least a certain subset thereof) to use Haskell without fully understanding it. But this approach has serious UI problems of its own. It's not very comfortable to use a platform whose semantics you don't understand. There's no comparable hidden complexity in Ruby, Python, Perl, JS, etc.

Laziness is also a significant UI problem, inasmuch as it becomes cognitively very difficult to understand and/or control the performance of your program. Typically in UI, when you find one UI disaster you find more - it shows that usability was not a principal goal of the project.

One of the difficulties in diagnosing usability problems of this type is that people rarely complain about them directly, because their complaint would typically be of the form "Haskell made me feel stupid." My guess is that for everyone who's succeeded in learning them a Haskell, there are four or five who tried it and came away feeling stupid. Not a very pleasant sensation.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#17
post #3

I hate to ad hominem, but this guy is a known troll of the Haskell community. (I don't know the back story but I believe it's related to him running an OCaml consultancy; many former OCaml fans, myself included, discovered Haskell as "that language that's like OCaml but better".) Rather than downvote his posts or comments to oblivion, I recommend reading it all with a lot of skepticism. For one example, he claims it…

I remember this post from a couple of years ago. I also remember thinking that it reflected more poorly on this guy than it did Haskell, and I think it still does today.

Additionally, one of the more important criticisms that I actually shared with the OP is that it took me a few evenings to get up and running with Haskell around 2008-2009 on Mac OS X. However that problem has been just about completely solved by the Haskell platform (http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/) these days.

Also, recent activity in the Snap and Yesod web frameworks makes me more optimistic for Haskell adoption in industry, although it still has to clear a lot of adoption hurdles before it becomes more common.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#18
post #13
post #4

I don't mean to be cruel, but Haskell is simply not a good language for 2012. It feels like I'm programming for 1983, with the poor syntax and silly idioms. There's a reason that eight out of the ten top programming languages in use today are C or C descendants - C is a great language to read and write, and for 90% of programming tasks (and 99.9% of business programming tasks), how easy it is for the programmer to co…

This is the first time I see someone seriously dismiss, and choose, a programming language based solely on its syntax. Also the first time I see one to pretend Haskell makes it more difficult to express oneself because of the syntax. Surely, you were talking about the comments syntax. They really make it horrible to express anything.

I choose every language I use based on the expressiveness of the syntax. What other reason is there to choose a language?

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#19
post #15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C syntax predates 1983, but it works. Haskell's operators are wonk: [0,1,2,3]!!2 versus: [0,1,2,3][2] Clearly !! is a logical array indexing operator.

You can define your own operator, if you want to. There are legitimate gripes you can have about Haskell syntax, but this is just trolling.

Calling someone a troll because they disagree with you is pretty offensive.

And I don't want to define my own operator. I can define my own words in English as well, but I'd rather use the same words everyone else is using so it will be easier to communicate with them.

If Haskell were as great of a language as you say, it would be more popular.

Re: Why is Haskell used so little in the industry?

#20
I've been using an awesome haskell app (xmonad http://xmonad.org/) for a long time and haven't had any issues with it. It is quite popular. It's a neat tiling manager which helps me immensely. I am sure there are other haskell success stories.

This article is very scary as the guy is throwing a lot of numbers, would love to see someone from Haskell post a rebuttal.

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