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Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

foxhound.systems

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Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#31

Post by mjburgess »

st1x7 wrote: post #11
infinityplus1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has to take the first step to solve the chicken and egg problem. If there are jobs requiring Haskell, it might get more users.

I don't think that it's wise to sabotage your own future and productivity as a company just so you can pave the way for some language to become more popular.

It isn't, of course. But the crowd of other people want you to do that.

It's the role of applause (and in your case, downvotes). The crowd throws cheap adulation at individuals who act against their own interests.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#32

Post by fegu »

If you want to get a feel of the productivity using Haskell in production start with a simple CRUD app and use IHP (https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/) to build it. You will have something usable within a day - GUI and all. Then move further down the rabbit hole from there.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#33

Post by kungito »

jcelerier wrote: post #30
avl999 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason they "find that the compiler feels like an annoyance" is because their first exposure to Java / C++ is in school where they have an assignment due for tonight and the compiler won't stop banging pages of errors about std::__1::basic_string > and what the fuck is that shit I just want to make games !!11!1! Well I can't imagine how much more annoyed they'd be when using an interpreted language which lets t…

having just spent an hour over vscode live share with a student who's learning javascript, I have a pretty good idea. But I've worked with people who saw all compiler errors as things of the devil and wanted to defer as much as possible to runtime.

faculty helps students debug their code?? where?

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#34

Post by erik_seaberg »

unicornmama wrote: post #3

Good luck scaling this to organization of 100+ engineers. You will soon learn the tradeoff between writing and reading code. And the stark realities of the dev hiring markets and the thing called a learning curve.

Is is actually hard to hire for Haskell? You can’t just tell some random to learn it (because his head will explode), but my impression is that you’ll have candidates coming out of the woodwork who could never get away with using it before but always wanted to.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#35

Post by jcelerier »

kungito wrote: post #33
jcelerier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having just spent an hour over vscode live share with a student who's learning javascript, I have a pretty good idea. But I've worked with people who saw all compiler errors as things of the devil and wanted to defer as much as possible to runtime.

faculty helps students debug their code?? where?

I'm in france haha. why wouldn't you help a student who asks you kindly ?

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#36

Post by tome »

st1x7 wrote: post #19
detaro wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market works somewhat differently for small companies there. Yes, there are fewer people with relatively niche skills, on the other hand you have an easier time to attract the few you need. Not every company wants to become large.

> on the other hand you have an easier time to attract the few you need How is it easier to find a Haskell developer vs finding a Java/Python/PHP developer?

I've never hired a Haskell developer, but anecdotally from my friends and associates who have, if you put out an advertisement for a Java/Python/PHP developer you get 500 applications from average candidates. If you put out an advertisement for a Haskell developer you get 5 applications from good candidates.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#37

Post by dragonwriter »

detaro wrote: post #28
st1x7 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on the other hand you have an easier time to attract the few you need How is it easier to find a Haskell developer vs finding a Java/Python/PHP developer?

I hear far more complaints about how difficult it is to find good people from companies hiring for mainstream languages than from those using more niche stuff, I would assume mostly due to larger competition among employers for the former (and in parts better community access for small shops in niche languages and self-selection of who learns the niche languages)

> I hear far more complaints about how difficult it is to find good people from companies hiring for mainstream languages than from those using more niche stuff

I would assume that:

(1) Those using niche stuff are less likely to be hiring under the impression that the main measure of skill is years of experience with a language, and

(2) those using niche stuff are, on average, doing more interesting work that attracts more intellectually curious candidates.

As a result, the mainstream firms get worse candidates, and try to compensate by asking for even more years of experience, and asking for years of experience not just with language but specific libraries and other tools, hoping that will get them more skilled candidates, at least for their specific toolchains. But doubling down on that just gets them candidates that are less capable (because even to the extent years of experience are useful, there are diminishing returns, and people who have spent a huge amount of time with the same stack also are likely to be in the “1 year of experience, repeated N times” category, rather than N years of learning and compounding knowledge. (Also, because at a certain point you start making impossible demands, increasing the degree to which the hiring process filters for dishonesty.)

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#38

Post by cjfd »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #22
avl999 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason they "find that the compiler feels like an annoyance" is because their first exposure to Java / C++ is in school where they have an assignment due for tonight and the compiler won't stop banging pages of errors about std::__1::basic_string > and what the fuck is that shit I just want to make games !!11!1! Well I can't imagine how much more annoyed they'd be when using an interpreted language which lets t…

In my experience, you quickly develop an intuition for where things are going wrong with interpreted languages. Ex: "Oh, cannot access property x of undefined? Something must be going wrong in y object" Python definitely feels a lot more helpful than JS though. Can't speak for other interpreted languages like Ruby.

The thing is, though, that you mostly only get errors for code that is actually executed. So, your program is only fully type checked when all code paths are executed. In the case of python one can ameliorate this situation a bit by using mypy. At my job I see very often code being broken because, e.g., the signature of a function was changed but not in all places and so on. Now somebody will say that the IDE can solve that but these colleagues who are regularly breaking the code are actually using IDEs and it somehow still does not help. I have come to think that code that is not compiled and/or otherwise type checked is just not very serious and certainly not worthy of production environments.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#39

Post by dan-robertson »

avl999 wrote: post #17
jcelerier wrote: post #2

> Many programmers encounter statically typed languages like Java or C++ and find that the compiler feels like an annoyance. By contrast, Haskell’s static type system, in conjunction with compile-type time checking, acts as an invaluable pair-programming buddy that gives instantaneous feedback during development. the reason they "find that the compiler feels like an annoyance" is because their first exposure to Java…

> the reason they "find that the compiler feels like an annoyance" is because their first exposure to Java / C++ is in school where they have an assignment due for tonight and the compiler won't stop banging pages of errors about std::__1::basic_string > and what the fuck is that shit I just want to make games !!11!1! Well I can't imagine how much more annoyed they'd be when using an interpreted language which lets t…

I feel like it probably isn’t worthwhile to litigate the merits of static typing every time there is a HN post that’s vaguely adjacent to the topic.

For the amount people care about it, there isn’t much evidence in either direction. And most studies that do exist are limited to small programs typically written by novices. Yale’s Singapore campus are going to be running two instances of the same course in parallel soon, one in python and one in ocaml. Perhaps that will provide a datapoint about learning the languages but maybe there will just be a lot of selection bias or library or environment or teacher differences. And how easy it is to learn a language probably isn’t the main datapoint to care about anyway.

Re: Haskell is our first choice for building production software systems

#40

Post by js8 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #21
js8 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the reason why I found static typing annoying in the past (and why I felt more productive in Python) were the types are really low level (missing basic things like tuples) and lack of type inference. You have to repeat the type information, a lot. And also you have to declare lot of intermediate data structures. In Python, this became easier and one could focus on the data transformations, thinking about th…

I've joined several companies, and getting into a Python code base was the most difficult one, because of the lack of typed method parameters. It was easier with Java and better still with Scala - same for Typescript vs. Javascript. I would be interested, is your Python experience green field or joining a large project? (just wanting to know, not implying anything on your part).

It was an experience on my personal projects, cca 20 years ago. That's when I started using Python and it really felt more powerful than C++ (and Java) back then. Then around 2008 I became interested in Common Lisp, and then later I made the choice to learn Haskell instead of Clojure. It took me a while before actually getting where is the improvement in Haskell and functional programming. This was all for my own personal projects, which are small programs.

I would still recommend against using Python on a big project. Funny thing, I remember talking to my boss (a mainframe programmer) in 2010, when I solved something with a script in Python, that I wouldn't use it in production, but it's great for small things. Forward to 2020, plenty people use it in products. Maybe the Haskell will be the same, you also have many people today saying "well this is good for experiments but I wouldn't write a product in it".

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