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Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

palgorithm.co.uk

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Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#131

Post by applicative »

codexon wrote: post #78
loup-vaillant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I ever saw Don Stewart "bombing" were factual evidence. And what he destroys by truth should be annihilated anyway (P. C. Hodgell). "Don Stewart said so, it must be true" actually isn't such a bad heuristic (as far as Haskell is concerned). From what I've seen, Don is quite cautious.

The only thing I ever saw Don Stewart "bombing" were factual evidence. This is not surprising coming from someone involved with Haskell. Do I really need to point to you the bug ticket that it was only 8 months ago that you could use something other than GMP? http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/601 Even with the option to dynamically link, it still doesn't change the fact that it was the __default__. And what…

This is febrile raving, codexon, why are you insisting on it? It is like a kind of madness, right on its face. A range of solutions were given on http://haskell.forkio.com/gmpwindows of which the writer, Sigbjorn Finne, said "nothing too magic or new here". None of them seem particularly appetizing, of course, which is presumably why people continued to labor.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#132

Post by [deleted] »

codexon wrote: post #78
loup-vaillant wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I ever saw Don Stewart "bombing" were factual evidence. And what he destroys by truth should be annihilated anyway (P. C. Hodgell). "Don Stewart said so, it must be true" actually isn't such a bad heuristic (as far as Haskell is concerned). From what I've seen, Don is quite cautious.

The only thing I ever saw Don Stewart "bombing" were factual evidence. This is not surprising coming from someone involved with Haskell. Do I really need to point to you the bug ticket that it was only 8 months ago that you could use something other than GMP? http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/601 Even with the option to dynamically link, it still doesn't change the fact that it was the __default__. And what…

[deleted]

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#133

Post by applicative »

applicative wrote: post #131
codexon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I ever saw Don Stewart "bombing" were factual evidence. This is not surprising coming from someone involved with Haskell. Do I really need to point to you the bug ticket that it was only 8 months ago that you could use something other than GMP? http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/601 Even with the option to dynamically link, it still doesn't change the fact that it was the __default__. And what…

This is febrile raving, codexon, why are you insisting on it? It is like a kind of madness, right on its face. A range of solutions were given on http://haskell.forkio.com/gmpwindows of which the writer, Sigbjorn Finne, said "nothing too magic or new here". None of them seem particularly appetizing, of course, which is presumably why people continued to labor.

I was trying to think why I found this so disturbing: "I simply have no ulterior motive or incentive against organized groups who have their livelihoods and PhDs based on Haskell." The thing is, it cannot be honest. A simple reflection, a Google search, e.g. http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&a... and some time spent reflecting on the modules linked, will show that Don S. could make a far better 'livelihood' doing just about anything other than writing Haskell. The trouble you are faced with is this, that the only way to explain all of this is that he does these things because he thinks they are right and good, and for no other reason.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Flow wrote: post #128
loewenskind wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't me who downvoted. I can't (since you responded to me) and wouldn't have anyway. If you use last then that means the whole list will have to be sorted O(n log n ish) then the last element retrieved. And yes, I'm assuming a merge sort. But I still don't think that detracts too much from my point.

Could you please s/max/min/ in your first post?

[deleted]

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#135

Post by loewenskind »

Flow wrote: post #128
loewenskind wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't me who downvoted. I can't (since you responded to me) and wouldn't have anyway. If you use last then that means the whole list will have to be sorted O(n log n ish) then the last element retrieved. And yes, I'm assuming a merge sort. But I still don't think that detracts too much from my point.

Could you please s/max/min/ in your first post?

But it depends on the sort algorithm. In the exercise I did this on (in Ocaml with some custom lazy code, since Ocaml's wasn't lazy enough for what I was doing) I did sort in descending order.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#136

Post by vicaya »

jrockway wrote: post #48
codexon wrote: post #24

I outlined some of the problems a while ago: http://www.codexon.com/posts/why-arent-functional-languages-... Short version: Haskell is harder than C while being slower and uses more memory. The main implementation GHC, comes with GPL concerns.

Interestingly, I came to the exact opposite conclusion. Haskell is easier than C++ (less code and more safety), and it is equally fast. Haskell may not be the perfect language for your generic FFT library to be distributed with your OS, but it's a great choice for building applications that would otherwise be C++ or Java. Java and C++ had no trouble catching on, despite being slower than C, and Haskell isn't even tha…

You know, it'd be more convincing if you can come up with reproducible benchmarks to backup your claims. According to This guy's data: http://www.codexon.com/posts/debunking-the-erlang-and-haskel... Haskell is even slower than python (which is not known for its speed) for implementing simple servers.

Haskell code that performs close (within an order of magnitude in terms of run time and space) to its C/C++ equivalent typically is also close in code length (and often less readable!) and often unsafe as well (requires explicit unboxing etc.)

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#137

Post by Flow »

loewenskind wrote: post #135
Flow wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please s/max/min/ in your first post?

But it depends on the sort algorithm. In the exercise I did this on (in Ocaml with some custom lazy code, since Ocaml's wasn't lazy enough for what I was doing) I did sort in descending order.

Are you saying you made a sort function that sorts reversed, and named it sort? What's wrong with sortDesc?

I think you should be more careful with following conventions. Everyone knows sort sorts ascending.

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#138

Post by ithkuil »

loewenskind wrote: post #98
ithkuil wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love haskell and understand your point. Laziness is beautiful and allows to express things in a simple way and also improve the reusability of the code etc. However I think that you didn't pick the best example. I tried out: >head $ sort [1 .. 10000000] 6 secs, using ~2g of heap! (actually is should be a reverse sort) and the "hand coded loop": >let mx (x:xs) m = if x > m then mx xs x else mx xs m; mx [] m = m >mx…

I should have pointed out that my code was theoretical and not actual. My example assumes a (non-tail call) merge sort. Sort specifically was (I felt) a small part of my point but I should have known that on a "hacker" site one must be exact. :)

I understand that you wanted to make a simple example, I just wanted to expand a little bit the issue of laziness and make it look slightly less magic.

I found a fascinating examples of the expressiveness and beauty of haskell due to lazy evaluation, which I think is better suited for FP evangelism:

fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

Here we are defining the fibonacci sequence in a declarative way, recursing with a recursive "call".

The way the 'fibs' function is coded directly reflects the definition of the fibonacci sequence itself:

The 'fibs' list is defined as a list containing the first 2 elements and then, as a tail, the result of the application of the + function on the previous pair of elements.

"You can borrow things from the future as long as you don't try to change them"

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#139

Post by loewenskind »

Flow wrote: post #137
loewenskind wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it depends on the sort algorithm. In the exercise I did this on (in Ocaml with some custom lazy code, since Ocaml's wasn't lazy enough for what I was doing) I did sort in descending order.

Are you saying you made a sort function that sorts reversed, and named it sort? What's wrong with sortDesc? I think you should be more careful with following conventions. Everyone knows sort sorts ascending.

Conceded. But I can't edit my original comment now. :(

Re: Why isn't Haskell popular in industry?

#140

Post by lelele »

jberryman wrote: post #126
lelele wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've just nailed it down: Haskell is for mathematicians, or those mathematically oriented. Most programmers are not mathematicians (especially self-taught ones) since at the end of the day common programming tasks don't require you to know advanced math (I'm not implying knowledge wouldn't be very beneficial).

mind sharing your experience with the language?

Learning Haskell has been a side project of mine the summer of two years ago, when there were a bit less tools to help newbies. Not an issue for me, since I've grown used to run code in my mind while reading it, because I firstly learned C without a computer for testing code on. I need fewer "reality checks" than more "hands on" developers (but I still throw snippets at the compiler to understand the gory details).

I think Haskell is for those mathematically oriented both because only mathematicians would have cared to wrestle with monads to achieve purity (Clean is as pure as Haskell, with no monads in sight) and because its notation, whose succintness matches that of maths.

I confess I've been scared of Haskell's heavy leaning on operators and many levels of precedence among them. I prefer more verbose languages. I'm not mathematically oriented, I think.

Have a nice day.

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