Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn. But when push comes to shove, your 9–5 career growth is probably going to be best optimized by cobbling a bunch of Python together and shipping it. Especially if you wr…
At my university (Chalmers University of Technology) Haskell is one of the first courses comp.sci students take to get introduced to programming. Haskell is immensely popular there with a lot of software engineering & comp.sci students
Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn. But when push comes to shove, your 9–5 career growth is probably going to be best optimized by cobbling a bunch of Python together and shipping it. Especially if you wr…
> Unless your boss or your boss’s boss are technical and opinionated about good software engineering
And if they don't care about ever making money off of your work. But most of us aren't doing [academic] research.
Technically correct is the worst kind of correct when your company runs out of money/revenue.
Let's say you write the best image decoder library for the next great image format, and everyone wants it on every device that is connected to the internet. Writing it in haskell would mean that only haskell users, or people willing to link in a large runtime, could use it. So, you write it in C or Rust, so anyone can link it in and not care what it was written in. Maybe also write a native Java version, because that…
Makes a lot of sense. Haskell comes with baggage and has an impedance-mismatch with other commonly used languages.
Similar reasons must have been to blame for the demise of Smalltalk. The best solution of its time many believe, but not easy to integrate with other languages and other ways of doing things.
Also let me add it was difficult to create small Smalltalk programs that wouldn't require most of the base-library to be tagged along. Then you couldn't import it to another environment where the base libraries were somewhat different.
Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn. But when push comes to shove, your 9–5 career growth is probably going to be best optimized by cobbling a bunch of Python together and shipping it. Especially if you wr…
Interestingly, the comp-sci program at University of Maryland does start with a list-esque system. They start with a very basic language and slowly add new features throughout the first course.
My writing is of course a bit hyperbolic. Some universities do teach non-imperative and non-Modula-style-OO as a part of their computer science course. But my experience shows that, unsurprisingly, fresh grads have the most comfort with a sprinkling of the most popular languages. To me, this is an indicator that industry-popular has tremendous influence on education-popular. For computer science, I disagree that industry should have such steep bearing on the construction of a good computer science education. For something like a vocational program, trade school, or whatever else that is close to SW engineering, letting the industry strongly influence the program is agreeable.
Because the industry isn’t dominated by well thought out solutions. Most programmers I talk to love the idea of spending time and using the perfect tools to design outstanding solutions to problems. They discuss how much they supposedly like to learn. But when push comes to shove, your 9–5 career growth is probably going to be best optimized by cobbling a bunch of Python together and shipping it. Especially if you wr…
> Unless your boss or your boss’s boss are technical and opinionated about good software engineering And if they don't care about ever making money off of your work. But most of us aren't doing [academic] research. Technically correct is the worst kind of correct when your company runs out of money/revenue.
It’s possible to be non-academic and productive without pumping out mediocre, greedy-constructed code that doesn’t take advantage of the fruits of academic research, don’t you think? I think this is a characteristic of a pretty good software engineer.
If you look at software at various scales, Haskell does a lot to get the finely grained and maybe even medium grained parts right and correct. Yet, I don't see a convincing value proposition for Haskell for the coarser grained scales. On that level, the benefits of Haskell as a language dont shine anymore as brightly, and this is an area that many teams struggle with. And oh: Haskell's lazy evaluation is the reason w…
> ...introducing all kinds of weirdness I don't want to have in a business context.
Despite being a Haskell worshiper, I strongly agree with this.
i have railed/ranted (occasionally belligerently) about haskell after having a professional brush with it two years ago. haskell hasn't taken over the world because the community is haughty about haskell's giant warts. yes it's very welcoming and open to indoctrinating you on "best practices" but as soon as you diverge in the slightest (because someone before you diverged or because you need to do something unconvent…
Good rant and thanks for the example. Seriously, is this really Haskell:
> "Avoid success at all costs." > I mentioned this at a talk I gave about Haskell a few years back and it’s become quite widely quoted. When a language becomes too well known, or too widely used and too successful suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. You get caught and spend ages talking about things that have nothing to do with the research side of things. Success is great, but it comes at a price. -- Simon P…
Did you just call JS-lovers and Haskell-lovers cognitively defective?
I read it as more of an assertion that loving any language requires cognitive defects, some a bit more than others.
i have railed/ranted (occasionally belligerently) about haskell after having a professional brush with it two years ago. haskell hasn't taken over the world because the community is haughty about haskell's giant warts. yes it's very welcoming and open to indoctrinating you on "best practices" but as soon as you diverge in the slightest (because someone before you diverged or because you need to do something unconvent…
Good rant and thanks for the example. Seriously, is this really Haskell: $ $%%^^^ a b (@@@ c d) $$$ e f What does it do?
i made that up but absolutely you can make this a thing in haskell because of operator overloading