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Why Not Haskell?

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Re: Why Not Haskell?

#31

Post by j_baker »

Miky wrote: post #27
j_baker wrote: post #15

I agree with the author, but for different reasons. I think Haskell suffers from a "network effects" problem. It's not made for real world use cases because nobody is using it for the real world. And guess what? To get it adopted in the real world, it needs to support real world use cases. I think that Haskell is doomed to a life of being a research toy language for the simple reason that that's what people are using…

Have you seen all the libraries up on Hackage? Haskell probably has way more real-world stuff than you think.

Indeed I have. And most of those libraries are unfinished, poorly documented, or both. In short, it's great that people are putting the effort in. But Haskell has a long way to go still before it can compete with languages like python or ruby.

Don't get me wrong. I love Haskell, and am willing to put up with things I wouldn't put up with in other languages. But it makes it difficult for me to sell the language to others who will also have to work with it.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#32

Post by Adaptive »

joeyh wrote: post #22

I've only written two notable haskell programs. One (git-annex) is a large-ish, serious work, and I have been very pleased with how haskell has made it better, even though there was a learning curve (took me two weeks to write the first prototype, which I could have probably dashed off in perl in two days), and even though I have occasionally been blocked by the type system or something and had to do more work. One c…

I was very excited when I first discovered git-annex. When I saw it was written in haskell that sealed the deal for me. The haskell code I run is all very robust and I was very happy you'd selected it for g-a. Have you posted anything else about how specifically Haskell has made it better? I'd enjoy reading more about that.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#34

Post by jberryman »

michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

> laziness is not intuitive

That's just, like, your opinion, man. In the context of a declarative programming language, laziness is so intuitive it hardly needs a name.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#35

Post by jberryman »

j_baker wrote: post #31
Miky wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen all the libraries up on Hackage? Haskell probably has way more real-world stuff than you think.

Indeed I have. And most of those libraries are unfinished, poorly documented, or both. In short, it's great that people are putting the effort in. But Haskell has a long way to go still before it can compete with languages like python or ruby. Don't get me wrong. I love Haskell, and am willing to put up with things I wouldn't put up with in other languages. But it makes it difficult for me to sell the language to oth…

Sorry, but if we're talking about the quantity of poorly documented, broken, shat-straight-onto-github libraries out there, then ruby wins by a mile.

This isn't a challenge, but I'm curious what standout libraries that ruby or python have for which Haskell is lacking in a good alternative.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#37

Post by michaelochurch »

waqf wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

> I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. This. My current opinion as to what would constitute a perfect language is: something built on top of Haskell which wo…

Monads are not unreadable. When you finally get do-notation and realize that you can use the same idioms for (a) list comprehensions, (b) imperative-style programming, and (c) error-handling and option-chaining, there's a "Wow" moment. However, we can give up on selling monads to the masses. The name alone...

The concept of the monad is beautiful and awesome, but it's too different to succeed with the masses.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#38

Post by Periodic »

waqf wrote: post #12
michaelochurch wrote: post #3

Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use. I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too pain…

> I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. This. My current opinion as to what would constitute a perfect language is: something built on top of Haskell which wo…

Can you explain a little more what you mean about the dataflow?

When I was writing some game simulations I ended up creating a few different monads for different execution contexts. I would have my main world monad which contained configuration data, world state, information about all the actors, the random number seed. Then I would have other contexts like AI which is where the AI would figure out what to do, having handy stuff like all the current actor's data easily accessible, and which would return actions on the World. Then there would be the monad for Actions themselves, which would have a source and a maybe a target.

In short, I found using a few monads to clearly segment how different things interacted with each other actually made the program fairly clear. The Monads were all just stacks of State, Reader, Writer, and Maybe monads. It seemed like a very natural way to write something where the primary goal is to iterate on a function of type "World -> World", i.e. "Game ()".

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#39

Post by joeyh »

Adaptive wrote: post #32
joeyh wrote: post #22

I've only written two notable haskell programs. One (git-annex) is a large-ish, serious work, and I have been very pleased with how haskell has made it better, even though there was a learning curve (took me two weeks to write the first prototype, which I could have probably dashed off in perl in two days), and even though I have occasionally been blocked by the type system or something and had to do more work. One c…

I was very excited when I first discovered git-annex. When I saw it was written in haskell that sealed the deal for me. The haskell code I run is all very robust and I was very happy you'd selected it for g-a. Have you posted anything else about how specifically Haskell has made it better? I'd enjoy reading more about that.

I've been meaning to blog about that sometime soon. (Edit: I did write this post earlier http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/happy_haskell_hacker/) Also been meaning to do a screencast showing what I think of as type driven refactoring, since while I've heard haskell programmers discuss it I've not seen it actually demonstrated

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#40

Post by teaspoon »

pnathan wrote: post #17

I've been spending time learning Haskell lately, as part of an investigation into tools which are amenable to static analysis at work. To learn about the situation, I've put together similar programs in Lisp, OCaml, and Haskell, as well as installed compilers for Haskell & Ocaml on the PPC. Well - I've coded for over a decade, and I've never encountered such a difficult to use language and jargony community & documen…

Special operators out the wazzoo...Google doesn't help here - I don't even know the verbal names for some of them.

Operators are just functions, so try Hoogle:

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%3E%3E%3D

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