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Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

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Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#191

Post by crimsonalucard »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
jwdunne wrote: post #8

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines. If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of dep…

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

Haskell is actually less expressive. It is a functional abstraction on top of what is essentially a procedural machine and with all abstractions placed on top of lower layers you can only lose functionality as you go up rather than gain. You could say assembly language is the most expressive language out there.

The great thing about Haskell and other functional programming languages is that the functional style forces the program to be created in a form that is modular and elegant. Programs become modular and composable and re-composable in the functional world because the programmer has No Choice but to build his programs in an elegant way. It's hard to explain this to a typical programmer who hasn't dived deep into functional programming but code reuse, modularity and elegance are significantly higher in functional programming languages than in procedural.

This elegance, beauty and forced organization comes at a high cost though. And the cost is thinking in a way that is outside the normal paradigm of what humans are use to. I know a lot of haskellers think that humans can be taught to think in both ways equally, I disagree with them and believe that it is far Easier for a human to think about an algorithm procedurally than it is for him to think about it functionally.

If you have several tasks to execute, what is your first thought on how to plan out those tasks? A task list (aka list of functions) or a series of composed tasks placed in a single sentence (aka expression)? The answer is obvious: humans think about the list first because procedural programming comes more naturally.

This I believe is the main reason why Haskell or lisps haven't taken over the programming world. Functional programming is just HARDER. It takes me 10 times longer to hack out a simple program in haskell than it does in python because haskell doesn't allow you to 'hack' together a program. In haskell the application has to be an elegant diamond or the thing won't even compile! Python allows me to hack something together quickly which is both a good and a bad thing because as we all know hacking together software is quick but easily leads to unmaintainable software.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#192

Post by wollstonecraft »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
jwdunne wrote: post #8

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines. If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of dep…

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

https://code.google.com/p/ganeti/

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#193

Post by theoh »

shmageggy wrote: post #147
TheCondor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

Off the top of my head, Pandoc, a tool for converting between different markup/down flavors, and xmonad, a tiling window manager for linux. Both are well known and popular.

Is there anything actually interesting about what they do, though? Converting markup is not a complex task.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#194

Post by theoh »

TheCondor wrote: post #134
jwdunne wrote: post #8

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines. If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of dep…

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

The Functional Pearls series, of which you are probably aware, seems to be full of idiomatic and brilliant Haskell techniques. It's not an application but it's a flowering of expression, of a sort...

https://wiki.haskell.org/Research_papers/Functional_pearls

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#195

Post by crimsonalucard »

noir_lord wrote: post #104
jwdunne wrote: post #8

It is, I think, going to be very difficult to enjoy writing code in a less powerful language when you are exposed to languages that hold awesome power. In fact, this has been the basis for much writing on Lisp too. Paul Graham has written entire essays along the same lines. If you work in a job that forces the use of a less powerful language than what you've been exposed to, you can, I think, go through a sort of dep…

I prefer less powerful languages (that have sufficient power to clearly express the domain). I've found that "powerful" languages allow me to do clever things(TM) and I hate clever things(TM) retroactively when I come back to them. This gets even worse when you have multiple people on the team doing clever things(TM).

Powerful languages do clever things under the hood so you don't have to(TM). All programmers use this same abstraction so there is no confusion.

Less powerful languages force the programmer to come up with their own clever abstractions so that if you have multiple programmers you'll end up with 20 different clever ways of doing the same thing.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#196

Post by base698 »

bborud wrote: post #62
kuschku wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially because Go is in most ways less powerful than Java – a native compiler for Java would have been more useful than this.

What do you mean by "powerful"? How is a language powerful? Or not?

From Paul Graham, and one of the best essays on the subject ever written: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in Blub? It doesn't even have y.

By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#197

Post by imsofuture »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
AsyncAwait wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember that Haskell is something like 25+ years old. Yet, I'd argue that tooling is still one of the worst aspects of the language. The whole cabal/stack thing is a mess.

Yet, at least we can use proper versions instead of Git urls that are exposed in source code.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how go dependencies work.

Dependencies are simply package names. It just happens that names are actually meaningful and tell you where you, the developer can get the package. Using vendoring and/or Godep/glide, you then strictly version and manage your dependencies. `go build` doesn't just run `git clone` or something.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#198

Post by peatmoss »

seagreen wrote: post #173
TheCondor wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to ask this without it sounding offensive, and I don't intend it that way. But do these "hardcore" haskellers enjoy writing programs at all? Like are there any well known open source apps that people actually use written in Haskell? There are tons of hobbiests and it has a following but what are the examples of its greatness? I ask as an old SML guy, I like the math theory, I like the promise of bett…

In addition to the others mentioned, PostgREST: https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest

Any high-profile users of this that I might have heard of? Because on first look, PostgREST looks kind of... amazing.

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#199

Post by efdee »

kasey_junk wrote: post #95
cube2222 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that it doesn't. I meant smaller parts of code, and not for loops actually. (I prefer maps, filters etc.). Things like gofmt and the simplicity (in that, small number of concepts) of the language lead to most people writing fairly idiomatic code. This way most codebases look the same and you read each other's code as it were yours.

Honestly the biggest thing go has going for it is gofmt. Its one of the few things I miss when I work with other languages.

Doesn't every semi-decent IDE have an option to reformat your code? What makes gofmt so special?

Re: Three Months of Go, from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)

#200

Post by coldtea »

daxfohl wrote: post #185
unscaled wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clever things like a sort function that can sort both ints and floats and any new type that implements a comparison function?

Or a quicksort in constant memory.

Haskell, if that's where the sneer is addressed to, absolutely gives you that.

It's just toy first-timer Haskell examples of quicksort (that still work, mind you) that don't.

But then again, take a language like C, and consider how many things (like proper error handling) are missing from 99% of the toy tutorial examples available.

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