Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I never finish my Haskell programs

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 228 posts

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#161

Post by gmueckl »

tomxor wrote: post #149
chongli wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blank canvas analogy is a good one but for the wrong reason. Think of the aspiring novelist with a blank stack of paper in front of them. The problem is not the freedom they have, it's their lack of discipline. It's far easier to write PR for an agency or injury reports for a sports blog than it is to write a novel. The reason so many programmers struggle with this problem is because nobody is paying them to writ…

> People only go down rabbit holes when they don't have a manager breathing down their neck all day. It takes real discipline to create really good hobby projects on your own, regardless of language. I agree, but perhaps discipline is not necessarily complete restraint... I think some rabbit holes are worth exploring, they can separate outstanding projects from mediocrity. Perhaps it's about choosing the right rabbit…

It takes experience to get a sense of where to spend that time. There are parts in any project that are write only fluff that will not be changed or extended much once written. Then there are the others where you know that things will need to grow and change a lot. There, it is incredibly important to find a good starting point fron which the code can grow with as little pain as possible. A day or two to find the right approaches there can pay off nicely.

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#162

Post by m_mueller »

tincholio wrote: post #156
nextos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I think it's because large programs always end up containing subproblems that can be better expressed in other paradigms than functional. And it becomes frustrating when I can't shoehorn them to the Haskell way of doing things. My favorite languages are, for this reason, multi-paradigm: Common Lisp, Mozart/Oz, Scala and C++. It's a bit like building La Sagrada Familia (and that's why it's depicted in the…

I agree with your sentiment, but I find the analogy to La Sagrada Familia funny, in that is has still not been finished, it's a black hole for money, and you can see, clearly, it's a hodge-podge of styles... All characteristics that might not be good for your software project.

which large software project has ever been ‚completed‘?

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#163

Post by namibj »

tomxor wrote: post #149
chongli wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blank canvas analogy is a good one but for the wrong reason. Think of the aspiring novelist with a blank stack of paper in front of them. The problem is not the freedom they have, it's their lack of discipline. It's far easier to write PR for an agency or injury reports for a sports blog than it is to write a novel. The reason so many programmers struggle with this problem is because nobody is paying them to writ…

> People only go down rabbit holes when they don't have a manager breathing down their neck all day. It takes real discipline to create really good hobby projects on your own, regardless of language. I agree, but perhaps discipline is not necessarily complete restraint... I think some rabbit holes are worth exploring, they can separate outstanding projects from mediocrity. Perhaps it's about choosing the right rabbit…

Or you just fail due to your own miss-management more than just once, and learn that structure is not for the boss but for you, yourself. Happens more often when the style of abstraction is restricted for performance reasons (i.e., no java-like OO and so) and you fall on something like buffer mismatch like I once did (to e fair, it was a bug that repeatably depended on the presence of explicit synchronization calls and there was no documentation about that possibly changing anything).

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#164

Post by AlexCoventry »

ainar-g wrote: post #8

>I ought to be able to generalize this I've never understood this. Unless you write a library that you plan to publish, or already have actual cases where you need a more general solution, why spending time trying to generalise code instead of switching to the next task?

Some people overvalue the power of generality, and overdiscount the obscurity and complexity it tends to involve.

Also, it's not a bad way to learn the ins and outs of the language, really.

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#165

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

I have this with all languages I get into. I get the urge to radically adopt whatever patterns seem to be idiomatic for the language, whether that's sensible or not.

I tend to judge beginner friendliness of a language by how strong that urge tends to be, and I tend towards Common Lisp since it is very multi-paradigm and not very opinionated, yet with very little semantic warts that bite the user in the end. There are easier languages to pick up if you have no concept of programming (things like HyperTalk or Scratch) but they have obvious semantic deficiencies.

Haskell on the other hand is an excellent first language for structured teaching because it's easy to express concepts in, but it stubbornly resists attempts by the inexperienced or impatient to shotgun or cargo-cult a solution.

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#166

Post by always_good »

SanFranManDan wrote: post #126
chongli wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drawback with Elm is that it has a trigger-happy BDFL who doesn't care about breaking everything all the time. Haskell has a long history and has broken very few things over the years (n+k patterns come to mind).

Started looking at Elm this weekend as a possibility for it to compile into other languages (javascript/elixir). Its too bad every release requires most packages to be rewritten. The good news is that releases are getting slower and slower, so you might go a year without any releases (even minor version patches). I guess that counts as LTS. Elm would be so awesome if they just forked it at 0.19 and said "no more brea…

Well, Elm is clearly still figuring out its core APIs. 0.19 refactored a lot of things into https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/browser/1.0.0/, for example. And Elm's package.json equivalent was completely changed. And major questions like server-side rendering aren't even answered yet.

Seems like the opposite of a good time to release 1.0.

Of course, this means most people won't have an appetite for unstable Elm, but that's nothing new. Complaining that something is still 0.x unstable seems odd to me beyond the selfish "I wish I had it sooner."

A lot of HN's comments around Elm remind me of when I was a kid absolutely livid at Bungie for not releasing Halo 2 sooner. Doesn't Bungie know my summer just started? I don't want a fucking beta, Bungie! Me want game now! Bungie must be incompetent because everyone on my gaming forum wants it now as well!

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#167

Post by AlexCoventry »

l0b0 wrote: post #138

There are lots of relevant programming aphorisms: "Write the simplest thing that could possibly work." "YAGNI." "KISS." You either have a problem you need to solve or not. If not, why do you expect the process to ever finish? This is one area where TDD really shines. You write a simple failing test and implement something that makes that test pass. If that isn't sufficiently generic you write another test, make both…

There needs to be a balance. You should choose an architecture which will accommodate predictable future needs without too much refactoring. A suite of unit tests can't help you much if you need to unmangle a bunch of severe abstraction violations between what you now need to be well-encapsulated components.

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#168

Post by dang »

hota_mazi wrote: post #137
yogthos wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the Haskell community is very friendly as long as you buy into their approach to solving problems. However, my experience is that if you question the effectiveness of static typing, or ask for evidence in support of the claimed benefits you'll get a very hostile reaction. The comment above where pka snidely claims that using any alternative to types amounts to yolo is quite representative. He outright dis…

Facts have been presented to you multiple times but your adoration of Clojure just makes you dismiss them outright. People who claim dynamic type systems are superior to static ones can be dismissed in much the same way flat earthers can because both choose to dismiss evidence they find inconvenient.

This comment breaks the site guidelines in multiple ways. No personal attacks, and no programming language flamewars, please, on Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#169

Post by lasagnaphil »

m_mueller wrote: post #162
tincholio wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, but I find the analogy to La Sagrada Familia funny, in that is has still not been finished, it's a black hole for money, and you can see, clearly, it's a hodge-podge of styles... All characteristics that might not be good for your software project.

which large software project has ever been ‚completed‘?

A lot of single-player (not online serviced) computer games could be regarded as ‘completed’: once they’re out on the store shelves, it’s pretty much done (although with the rise of Steam and continuous updates this is less of a case)

That’s probably why many game programmers are more pragmatic in their programming practices: they have a concrete deadline to pursue, with a predictable subset of hardware for their program to run...

Re: Why I never finish my Haskell programs

#170

Post by AlexCoventry »

dustingetz wrote: post #19

1) to me, this is the difference between haskell and Clojure 2) in the future, normal people will be able to code, so work backwards from that

> in the future, normal people will be able to code, so work backwards from that

Can you expand on that? Sounds intriguing, but I'm not sure what you mean.

Post reply on HN