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

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

barrucadu.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 363 posts

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

#291

Post by twic »

twic wrote: post #116
demarq wrote: post #2

I hate to sound like the rust evangelist strike force... I really do. But your complaints are exactly what it would solve... Sigh I hate to say this I really do. But here goes... So have you checked out rust?

> I hate to sound like the rust evangelist strike force... I really do. But your complaints are exactly what it would solve... Rust doesn't have lazy evaluation, or a particularly extensive standard library. I'm not aware that Rust has heap or thread profiling any better than Go's. For everything else, though, yes. I found Rust pretty easy to learn (coming from Java with a bit of Python background); i haven't mastere…

Also, does anyone fancy designing a Rust Evangelism Strike Force T-shirt? Because i would absolutely buy one.

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

#292

Post by Buttons840 »

jrobn wrote: post #49

I started out liking Go. It looked like a fairly pragmatic language. As I got deeper into my evaluation project (simple api stuff) it felt more and more like cutting wood with a dull saw. I started out liking Haskell too! But has I moved along with my small evaluation api project it felt more and more like I was trying to cut wood with gyroscopic laser saw. It worked but it was a lot of fan fair for sawing some wood.…

My impression of Elixir and Erlang are that they are the only dynamic languages I'm aware of that seem to have dynamic typing for solid technical reasons. Many languages are dynamic just for user experience reasons. But the way the BEAM VM handles hot code swapping, concurrency, and memory management, etc, required using a dynamic language. (As far as I'm aware?)

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

#293

Post by raulk »

icebraining wrote: post #238
raulk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a decent software engineer builds a project, you not only take into consideration the status quo of the technology, but also its promise, momentum and community development speed. You don't want to pick a stack with weaning manpower because you'll soon be left with legacy software in your hands. Hence, I do think that, for most serverside projects, the "promise" (as you call it) is very relevant and a true facto…

Yes, but that's a red herring. Outside maybe of the JavaScript world, the available tooling isn't divided into immature and near legacy. Haskell itself is a good example of a mature language still growing in popularity.

All I'm saying is that it's unfair to discredit the argument that Haskell has been around for 25 years, hence its had more time to evolve a more complete tooling offering. It is a valid argument.

If Haskell didn't exist and had only been launched a few years ago alongside Go, what would the status of its tooling be today? That would be a fairer comparison.

Obviously one can't measure it objectively, but you do have a comparable case with Elixir, I believe. And it's clear that Go surpasses Elixir in traction.

So let's not discredit the merits of Go in such a long time. It definitely has more happening for it now than Haskell or Elixir.

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

#294

Post by CJefferson »

sheepmullet wrote: post #288
SwellJoe wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking a lot lately about why Go, a quite minimalist language by modern standards, has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. It's about a decade old, and is already among the top 5 languages for people starting new OSS projects (at least in my area, which is systems management). Green field development is being done in Go at a rate unprecedented for such a new language, I think. Node/JS migh…

> has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. 1) Our industry is obsessed with new and shiny. 2) There are a lot of developers and companies who don't have the time to invest in a new paradigm or language. 3) By learning/using golang these developers and companies can look "hip" and forward thinking with minimal effort. With a Java background and a 10 hour investment in golang you can write decent softwar…

The problem is, people tell me that if I just learn Haskell, Idris, Closure, Coffescript, Rust, C++17, C#, F#, Swift, D, Lua, Scala, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme, Julia, Emacs Lisp, Vimscript, Smalltalk, Tcl, Verilog, Perl, Go... then I'll finally find 'programming nirvana'.

While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investment than anything else on that list.. why should I give it more than 10 hours?

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

#295

Post by CJefferson »

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.

I'm not sure I'll call xmonad popular. Also I know quite a lot of people who hate it -- because it's configuration language is "write some Haskell and recompile", so it tends to be very fragile (people who use Haskell love it)

Also found it crashed a lot, which I would have hoped would be one of the things Haskell would solve (the problems revolved it having to integrate into C code for linking to X, but that's part of living in the real world).

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

#296

Post by willtim »

ngrilly wrote: post #262
crimsonalucard wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 force…

I don't understand the downvote. The main argument looks valid: > 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 w…

It's overly simplistic. For example, Haskell's do notation allows asynchronous programming in a linear "task list" (to use your phrase). Yet most popular imperative programming languages do not; one must instead use callbacks.

As to whether programming with expressions is fundamentally harder, I'm not so sure. Since Fortran, most languages have supported arithmetic expressions over primitive numeric types, since they are certainly not easier with an imperative approach (MOV, MOV, ADD, PUSH). Haskell allows one to easily take this further using arbitrary objects and algebras, for example, expressions with drawing primitives, parsing grammars, financial contracts etc. With a small amount of syntactic sugar, you can even make expressions that look exactly like imperative programming (Haskell's do notation).

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

#297

Post by CJefferson »

59nadir wrote: post #88
gothrowaway wrote: post #81

When I look at a programming language, I look at the community and how it gets stuff done and projects that are noteworthy. Something about Haskell strikes me as different. Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3). The other thing is the general flow I've see with Haskell programmers…

> Despite the buzz about it, I don't see many projects for it other than shellcheck, pandoc and xmonad, and for two of those, there's better solutions around (sphinx, awesome/i3) I tried awesome for two weeks and had one crash. I've run XMonad for 5+ years and had no crashes. Just because they are supposed to accomplish the same things does not mean that they're equal. One is better and it's because of the choice of…

On the other side, I used XMonad for a while and it crashed frequently.

I did submit a bug report and it did get fixed, but there was another crash I couldn't be bothered to try to track down, and just switched back to the standard ubuntu shell.

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

#298

Post by [deleted] »

CJefferson wrote: post #294
sheepmullet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. 1) Our industry is obsessed with new and shiny. 2) There are a lot of developers and companies who don't have the time to invest in a new paradigm or language. 3) By learning/using golang these developers and companies can look "hip" and forward thinking with minimal effort. With a Java background and a 10 hour investment in golang you can write decent softwar…

The problem is, people tell me that if I just learn Haskell, Idris, Closure, Coffescript, Rust, C++17, C#, F#, Swift, D, Lua, Scala, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme, Julia, Emacs Lisp, Vimscript, Smalltalk, Tcl, Verilog, Perl, Go... then I'll finally find 'programming nirvana'. While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investm…

[deleted]

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

#299

Post by willsewell »

amelius wrote: post #93

> GHC’s garbage collector is designed for throughput, not latency. It is a generational copying collector, which means that pause times are proportional to the amount of live data in the heap. To make matters worse, it’s also stop-the-world. This is pretty much unacceptable in today's world of low-latency (web) apps. How active is GHC's development? Would it be possible to efficiently run Haskell using Go's runtime e…

> How active is GHC's development?

There are two active areas of development which could solve this problem (long pause times with a large working set):

* Compact regions -- which will provide off-heap storage that can be manually memory managed. These are shipping with GHC 8.2. See the paper here if you're interested: http://ezyang.com/compact.html

* Linear types -- A type system extension which allows the programmer to specify values which can only be used a single time. This allows a king of type-safe manual memory management where the compiler statically check that values are freed. This work is further off, but there is currently a prototype being developed in GHC. Check out this blog post for more information: http://blog.tweag.io/posts/2017-03-13-linear-types.html

> Would it be possible to efficiently run Haskell using Go's runtime environment, i.e. by changing the compiler backend?

It's an interesting thought, although I suspect this would be very challenging in practice. Haskell's lazy evaluation, with thunks instead of concrete values, probably wouldn't play nicely with Go's heap layout. I would also suspect Go's runtime has been quite special-cased to Go the language. It would nice if the Go runtime system was opened up in the same way the JVM is.

At this point it might be simpler to translate Haskell source syntax into Go.

My overall feeling is that putting more work into the standard GHC runtime system would be a more efficient use of time.

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

#300

Post by sheepmullet »

CJefferson wrote: post #294
sheepmullet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has been so incredibly successful in such a short time. 1) Our industry is obsessed with new and shiny. 2) There are a lot of developers and companies who don't have the time to invest in a new paradigm or language. 3) By learning/using golang these developers and companies can look "hip" and forward thinking with minimal effort. With a Java background and a 10 hour investment in golang you can write decent softwar…

The problem is, people tell me that if I just learn Haskell, Idris, Closure, Coffescript, Rust, C++17, C#, F#, Swift, D, Lua, Scala, Ruby, Python, Lisp, Scheme, Julia, Emacs Lisp, Vimscript, Smalltalk, Tcl, Verilog, Perl, Go... then I'll finally find 'programming nirvana'. While you might think it's worth spending 100+ hours learning Haskell, I don't (at the moment) have any reason to Haskell as a better time investm…

I completely agree.
Post reply on HN