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Becoming Productive in Haskell

mechanical-elephant.com

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Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#11

Post by grp »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

I daily use Xmonad, hledger and sometimes pandoc.

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#12

Post by icebraining »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

There's git-annex, which is a relatively complex software, runs on multiple platforms (Linux, OS X, Windows and Android) and is definitively useful.

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#13

Post by tobias2014 »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

darcs version control (http://darcs.net/) (what most people should use instead of git).

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#14

Post by david-given »

The author's comments on noise chime true with me: every time I give Haskell a try I end up struggling with frustrating and opaque vocabulary, sometimes completely at odds with the way other languages use them: e.g. C++ also has functors, and they're completely unrelated to Haskell functors.

I really like the author's suggestion of mentally translating Functor to Mappable. Are there any other synonyms for other Haskell terms of art?

What I'd really like, I suppose, is a complete overhaul of Haskell syntax to modernise and clarify everything: make it use actual words to describe things (foldl vs foldl'? BIG NO). Put in syntax redundancy and visual space to avoid the word soup effect: typing is cheap, understanding is expensive. Normalise and simplify terminology. Fix the semantic warts which make hacks like seq necessary --- if I need to worry about strictness and order of evaluation, then the language is doing lazy wrong. etc.

Basically I want language X such that X:Haskell like Java:K&R C.

This will never happen, of course; the people who have the knowledge to do such a thing won't do it because they are fully indoctrinated into the Haskell Way Of Life...

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#16

Post by kitd »

> After writing a parser with them, I began to understand other code that used them. I then started to understand the abstract nature of them…but that abstractness was a lesson for another day, not for starting out.

This definitely helped me too. I started out looking at functions and monads as 2 'types' of function that could only be mixed in certain ways, and didn't bother with the gory details at first. IME It's only when you experience monads and their effects that the gory details make perfect sense.

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#17

Post by [deleted] »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

[deleted]

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#18

Post by 1971genocide »

david-given wrote: post #14

The author's comments on noise chime true with me: every time I give Haskell a try I end up struggling with frustrating and opaque vocabulary, sometimes completely at odds with the way other languages use them: e.g. C++ also has functors, and they're completely unrelated to Haskell functors. I really like the author's suggestion of mentally translating Functor to Mappable. Are there any other synonyms for other Haske…

Its interesting, I know one Cambridge theoretical physicist who is immensely successful in his field. I found it really odd how he worked 5 years as a proffesional writer between working in university. He thinks of good writing as his "secret weapon" that made him successful in academia. He is one of the most well spoken person I have met and has instilled new respect for being a good writer which I didn't think about before ( I like the HN crowd think programming is everything ).

Its also interesting that pg is such an accomplished writer. I think programmers need to think about code and well written document as having the same importance.

Just my two thoughts.

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#19

Post by madez »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

For what we have learnt from the history of mathematics, you might have to give it some hundred years before people realize usefulness.

As a practical note, the fact that educated people use it is an indicator that it is useful.

Re: Becoming Productive in Haskell

#20

Post by Codas »

harry8 wrote: post #9

I don't think I have ever used a haskell program written by someone else that wasn't ghc. Is that usual? Are there now a bunch of .debs for useful things other than writing haskell that are actually written in Haskell? I'm not trolling, it's just a good test of what something is useful for when it's been around a while is to ask "Well, what has it actually been used for?"

There is also postgrest, providing a REST API for postgresql databases.

https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest

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