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State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

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Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#31

Post by mseri »

rifung wrote: post #4

> The rating of the "Educational" section still remains "Immature" until this book is out of Early Access and finally released, but once the book is out I will finally mark Haskell as having "Mature" educational resources. I haven't read the book myself, but is the book really so good that we can go from "Immature" to "Mature" with the release of just one book? I find that to be a bit strange considering Haskell is a…

The book is absolutely great, independently of the level. And also incredibly enjoyable to read and full of useful and well thought exercises and remarks

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#32

Post by fizbin »

johan_larson wrote: post #28
tathougies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app ( http://sostenoto.com ). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol. Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you would…

> Can't understand why you wouldn't be using Haskell for server-side web development. I can't tell whether that's just a rhetorical flourish, so I'll answer straight. To begin with, there are a couple of concerns that might kill an attempt to use Haskell. 1. I might not be able to get management approval. Haskell is an obscure language with a reputation for difficulty. The bosses might well say no. 2. I might need to…

My experience with writing real production Haskell code is this: your first large Haskell project will be a failure, largely from missed deadlines and being unable to properly judge what is going to be easy and what hard. (Unless you deliberately aim low and spend much more time than is really justifiable on something you could have done in some language you know better in a few days)

Your second one will take longer than it would have in PHP or J2EE or whatever else you're used to building web stuff in. It will, like the first, also be ugly but unlike the first project will eventually work. It'll also fall over catastrophically early on, but will be salvageable. Once past its initial deployment/perf issues, it'll sit and hum away quietly in a corner with much less care and feeding than traditional web technologies. (Though you'll keep wanting to go back to it, because it's more fun to work in that than whatever else you're working on)

The third production Haskell project will come together much more quickly. Unfortunately, by this time you'll probably be bringing other people on and this will be their first big Haskell project. (See above about what happens to first big Haskell projects) So the parts delegated to other programmers will fail to work, and there will need to be lots of hand-holding and discussion of type design at first.

Selling management on this is indeed difficult. I'll admit that I'm still not clear on how we sold the first (failed) project to management or how I convinced my boss to let me use Haskell a second time. I mean, I was there, but I don't know how I did it.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#33

Post by kyllo »

lvh wrote: post #20
kyllo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? It already is. If you are talking about a full stack web application, there are several fully featured production quality frameworks, Yesod being the most popular. What are the negatives to you? Long compile times? Monadic IO? Memory leaks from lazy eval?

I'm guessing the poster included being able to do front-end work in Haskell. elm and purescript might be plausible front-end languages, but ghcjs isn't really there yet.

Picking any compile-to-JS language (not counting ES6/7) is a risky proposition though. There are a lot of people regretting their five year-old "legacy" coffeescript applications today. GHCJS is improving at an astonishing rate, but at this point I still wouldn't use any compile-to-JS language for a serious production application. There's too high of a risk of building something that becomes unreasonably expensive to maintain in a few years.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#34

Post by phamilton »

rjayatilleka wrote: post #11
phamilton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

Did you switch that up? Learn You a Haskell is excellent for beginners. The intermediate space is the gap.

Beginner Haskeller, intermediate programmer is what I meant. Great for learning a new language, not great for learning a first language.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#35

Post by nickpsecurity »

dexwiz wrote: post #2

Can someone explain to me why Haskell will ever be viable as a fullstack language? I have done a few toy projects in Haskell, and it has taught me some great functional programming concepts that I now apply to other languages. But, purely functional programming seems to work 90% the time, but the other 10% is so negative it invalidates the rest. Edit for clarification: Full Stack would be app server up. So runs a ser…

"Full stack would be..."

For us older engineers, full-stack was hardware up to OS up to apps. Quite a few projects did that. Haskell is more full stack via that definition given it can build hardware (Bluespec), OS's (House), system code (Ivory), and web apps. Worst case, use it as a DSL to output the language of your choosing like 4GL's used to.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#36

Post by rifung »

phamilton wrote: post #9
rifung wrote: post #4

> The rating of the "Educational" section still remains "Immature" until this book is out of Early Access and finally released, but once the book is out I will finally mark Haskell as having "Mature" educational resources. I haven't read the book myself, but is the book really so good that we can go from "Immature" to "Mature" with the release of just one book? I find that to be a bit strange considering Haskell is a…

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

I read Learn You a Haskell but it seems to only cover beginning topics of Haskell. However I don't really recall much being made for intermediate or advanced Haskellers? At least I looked, hoping to learn more but didn't find anything that sounded particularly promising. If you have anything to recommend please let me know. I heard Real World Haskell was good but unfortunately hasn't been kept up to date.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#37

Post by rifung »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #13
phamilton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been an excellent resource for the intermediate programmer. Much of the intermediate to advanced space is already quite mature. The beginner space was the big gap.

Hi, I'm a coauthor of the book mentioned in the State of the Union post. The beginner parts were _a_ gap, but they weren't the only gap. In fact, none of the existing books really went very far beyond Monad, with only RWH covering monad transformers. So, part of the appeal of the book isn't just that we cover beginner topics better, we cover _everything_ from beginner to intermediate/advanced that you're likely to ap…

I'm happy to hear there's FINALLY a book that goes into performance and data structures.

I'm going to have to read this book after I'm done with my current one.

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#38

Post by noobermin »

johan_larson wrote: post #28
tathougies wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Haskell exclusively on my SaaS app ( http://sostenoto.com ). The backend not only provides a simple REST API, but it also provides WebRTC signaling and a real-time graphical communications and presence protocol. Haskell makes it so easy to write correct concurrent code it's not even funny. GHC's magnificent IO manager means I can handle 1000s of connections on one amazon instance. Can't understand why you would…

> Can't understand why you wouldn't be using Haskell for server-side web development. I can't tell whether that's just a rhetorical flourish, so I'll answer straight. To begin with, there are a couple of concerns that might kill an attempt to use Haskell. 1. I might not be able to get management approval. Haskell is an obscure language with a reputation for difficulty. The bosses might well say no. 2. I might need to…

To be fair, both issues you mentioned are "soft" issues[0], albeit important ones. That doesn't quite seem like the "10%" the GP is referring to, or may be it is, but it gave me the impression he was talking about technical issues, not soft ones.

[0] as in people/social/management issues

Re: State of the Haskell Ecosystem – February 2016

#40

Post by coolsunglasses »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #24

I think that I own 7 Haskell books, and there are good parts in all of them. A few of them are great. Why all the love and strong recommendation for a new unpublished book? I use Emacs, IntelliJ, and TextMate for Haskell. I love all three. I thought the best part of this article was the coverage of libraries because I find myself to be uncertain of selecting the most appropriate ones. I use a small subset of Haskell…

Hi, I'm a co-author of the book mentioned. Unpublished might be a bit uncharitable, the current version of the book is 26 chapters and over one thousand pages.

As for why? We make certain you actually learn everything you need to know and we _aggressively_ test and review the material with actual learners. My co-author Julie's first programming language is Haskell, which she has learned from me and while writing the book.

Here's a screenshot from our Zendesk for processing reader feedback and reviews: http://imgur.com/EdpL4ql

We are writing the book because I've been helping people in IRC (#haskell-beginners mostly which floats around 300 users), on Twitter, etc. I saw too many people burn out and give up with the existing resources (free & paid), despite maintaining a guide for learning Haskell with free resources: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell

It's just harder than it needs to be, so we're fixing that. Even the better existing books/resources don't cover nearly enough for somebody to move on to, say, writing a web application.

I wrote about the pedagogical issues with some of the existing resources here: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...

If you didn't find it difficult to learn Haskell, that's great! But most people find it intensely difficult and I think that's completely unnecessary. I've given a talk on this titled, "Learn Haskell in less than five years" located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9ccYzMbxc

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