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Leaving Haskell behind

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Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#201

Post by rg111 »

rg111 wrote: post #117

I want to seriously invest some time into properly learn a functional language. My goals are simple- write small scripts, solve programming problems in sites like Codewars, Leetcode, Euler Program, etc. And yes, having the "functional enlightenment" or something similar. Which language should I learn and invest time into? Scala, Clojure, Haskell, OCaml?

Thanks to everyone who answered.

And I now notice that autocorrect made Project -> Program. :/

I will keep a watch here for more responses.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#202

Post by rendall »

Shumer666 wrote: post #180

First off, learning Haskell's like trying to decipher an alien language. If you're used to plain ol' if-else loops and straightforward variable assignments, prepare to have your brain twisted into knots. Haskell's got monads, and no, they're not some new type of space monster – they're these weird abstract things that'll leave you scratching your head and questioning your life choices. Now, I know we all love librari…

Definitely worth repeating! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251323

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#203

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

xwowsersx wrote: post #141

It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit. That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool. It sounds to me like what is needed is the ability to mark all the experimental, envelope…

> It seems to me that the stewards and maintainers of the language actually _intend_ for Haskell to be friendly to research, experimentation and academic pursuit.

Yes, this is explicitly stated as a core principle in "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class" (2007) (direct PDF link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...).

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#204

Post by porcoda »

icrbow wrote: post #186
porcoda wrote: post #166

I had a pretty similar experience: spent a decade (2007-2017) working professionally in Haskell and just got completely fed up with the state of the language, ecosystem, and community. I migrated most of my new work to Ocaml and haven’t looked back. For me I think the failure of the Haskell Prime effort to establish a successor standard to Haskell 98 was a big factor: the language and ecosystem became more chaotic an…

For the reference, 2017 was the year of GHC 8.0. Since your decision to never look back there were a lot of good things. The standard didn't come out because of some failure to make it. It was mostly the lack of interest that killed it. I wouldn't be betting that some alternative universe where Haskell Prime pulled through had a noticeable increase of adoption because of this. Looking at proposals, arguments "from st…

I’ve paid attention to the language since 2017 (it’s kind of impossible not to if you work in the PL research field). I just consider it dead for my own work - that’s the sense in which I haven’t looked back.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#205

Post by tadfisher »

Tainnor wrote: post #150
dkarl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Java build tool would you say does dependency management decently? Most people are still using Maven or Gradle.

Depends on what you call "decently". Maven and Gradle do the job, but the bigger problem is the ecosystem: Libraries don't declare version ranges for their transitive dependencies (like they do e.g. in Ruby), instead they just depend on a specific version. Of course, because two different libraries may depend on the same subdependency but in different versions, you will just get one version and you have no way of kno…

You can depend on version ranges with Gradle, and those ranges are transitive if the library is also using Gradle; otherwise, you can override a library's transitive dependencies pretty easily with component metadata rules.

You can do so much with Gradle, but 90% of learning it is figuring out what knobs you need to twist; there's a lot of feature overlap and second-system-effect going on.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#206

Post by patmorgan23 »

systems_glitch wrote: post #135
pyrale wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask for my personal experience: - The community leans a lot on configuration over code, and that's annoying. Sometimes, a hardcoded string in your conf could have been a hardcoded string directly in the code. - Sometimes, dependency injection systems are so abstract that knowing which class is depended on in a specific runtime instance becomes a pain in the ass. - Your idea just won't load class x, the obvious…

These are job security features :P Seriously though, the hours spent fighting dependency injection and Hibernate issues alone, when working on a really big Java project, could've been a full-time job. For maximum fun, I once worked on a large ERP system that started out as a Struts 2/Hibernate 3/Jetty project and had an entire Rails app bolted on using JRuby. Some of the stuff in the JRuby side was injected thru Spri…

Gross

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#207

Post by systems »

movpasd wrote: post #174
js2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how personal this is. Sometimes I wonder if it comes down to familiarity. I've been using Python professionally since 2000 and have never run into issues with its tooling. It's even easier these days: "python -m venv" and then pip are all I need in 99% of use cases. For local development I use direnv + pyenv. I typically develop on macOS and deploy to either macOS or Linux. I previously gave pipenv a try b…

I don't have any issues with Python's packaging ecosystem anymore, having settled comfortably into a pyenv+virtualenv+pip-tools as my "stack" after going around the block a few times. But even so, I must recognise how awful the experience is for new users. It's taken me years to settle into this system, and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them. I also work a lot…

why do sometimes people say things like "and it can take half a day to get someone up to speed with these tools if they haven't used them"

half a day is like almost no time at all

half a day is just few hours, how is this a long time .. how is this any time at all

makes me doubt myself a bit, am i too mediocre to think that way

the previous line make more sense to me "It's taken me years to settle into this system" , now this is more like it

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#208

Post by dgb23 »

pooya72 wrote: post #14

If I had to choose the three big factors that contributed to my gradual loss of interest in Haskell, they were these : * the stylistic neophilia that celebrates esoteric code but makes maintenance a chore * the awkward tooling that makes working with Haskell in a day-to-day sense clunkier * the constant changes that require sporadic but persistent attention and cause regular breakages Valid points. Back in 2010-2012,…

Efficient immutable data structures are more important for FP than most of the features you listed. What is Java providing there?

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#209

Post by chubot »

girvo wrote: post #60
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #16

This really resonates with me. I’ve been using it in a decidedly industrial application for about 1.5 years now. I had some fairly significant experience with it prior ( https://github.com/mattgreen/hython ). For the first time in a long time (20 years experience) I’ve needed to learn a significant amount of things. It’s a combo of the domain and the language. It’s rather exhilarating, and also exhausting. Could also…

> I’m still thirsty for a PL that is essentially OCaml but with a better syntax. But that’s just me. Not just you, me too! In fact it’s why I went in deep on Reason when it arrived initially. Shame it never really got traction.

Me three! I came from Python (now with MyPy), learned OCaml and liked some aspects, was intrigued by Reason -- and also sad it seems to be in limbo.

I also miss early returns, and break/continue.

I would like "modern ML" / "Python with sum types" / "Rust with GC" language (indentation/braces doesn't matter to me). Many people seem to agree.

Recently I found TypeScript is kinda fun for this, at least if you're starting from no code, without ecosystem baggage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37171801

AFAIK TypeScript's type system can do everything in OCaml -- it's extremely expressive -- but it's dis-similar in that it doesn't use the types to compile to native code. I view that as a downside because JITs are unpredictable and also huge.

It has early return/break. The syntax is pretty conventional, with the usual JS weirdness that everyone has to know.

Re: Leaving Haskell behind

#210

Post by dkarl »

nobleach wrote: post #200
dkarl wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a lover of Scala who has seen Scala codebases go wrong in the cliché ways, Kotlin would be the first language I would consider if I were starting a new commercial software codebase today. Kotlin seems to have enough of the pragmatic elegance of Scala to get the job done with clarity and accuracy, without the curse of attracting the compulsive intellectual thrill-seekers that will ruin your Scala team if y…

Compulsive intellectual thrill-seekers... while I never want to call names, this does seem to explain the phenomena quite well. There are just some people out there that need the world to know how smart they are. Anecdotal: I do know one guy however who's just so ecstatic every time he figures new things out. To his way of thinking, everything that comes with "functional" truly is simpler. He built a dependency injec…

IMO "compulsive" is the damning word there. People who don't enjoy learning typically don't make good programmers, but you have to show respect for your coworkers when you choose your learning opportunities.
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