Haskell: where difficult problems are trivial, and where trivial problems are the subject of ongoing academic research
I tried Haskell for 5 years
41–50 of 273 posts
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#42Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
I just saw a haskell meetup where they're using haskell for devops. Basically static typing the underlying machine configurations. As usual, being an Haskell code, the abstraction is generalized and you can apply the logic on other domains.
Thats really interesting. So config files themselves could be considered as some complex type and the inherent language type checking may be used to validate them?
Somehow reminds me of Structs/Records in Erlang/Elixir and using pattern matching, conditions and guard clauses to enforce validity or logic.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#43> very hard to understand why a function could be useful in the first place So true. https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.9.1.0/docs/Contro... > mfix :: (a -> m a) -> m a > The fixed point of a monadic computation. mfix f executes the action f only once, with the eventual output fed back as the input. Hence f should not be strict, for then mfix f would diverge. But why tho?
The standard version [ fix :: (a -> b) -> b ] is weird too - I'd suggest reading up on that first, there's a lot of tutorials. You can use fix to write recursive functions, so I'm guessing mfix is analogous, it just handles some >>= plumbing for you.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#44Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
Application sweet spot is a funny thing, because it's mostly determined by the presence of specific libraries. What Haskell has more than anything is ridiculously general libraries. It's got perfectly good libraries for web development, Postgres access &access, but the only place I'd say it's got a real application-specific strength in libraries is parsing. Weirdly, what Haskell is good at is generality. Which is muc…
Ok, so the generality like LISP/Scheme with a few basic productions/rules and some basic operations could be used to create/represent any levels of complexity. Something like Northhead & Russell's Principia Mathematica.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#45Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
I think I can safely say it isn't used heavily in many production environments but it is used heavily in some. For example, one of Facebook's abuse systems, dealing with 1M requests per second is written in Haskell: https://code.facebook.com/posts/745068642270222/fighting-spa... As for particular places where it shines, I don't know of any in particular. I remember when taking my Declarative Programming course in uni…
The article you're looking for is http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr1049.pdf - Two of the top three (out of ten) solutions were made in Haskell, one by a beginner.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#46Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
I think I can safely say it isn't used heavily in many production environments but it is used heavily in some. For example, one of Facebook's abuse systems, dealing with 1M requests per second is written in Haskell: https://code.facebook.com/posts/745068642270222/fighting-spa... As for particular places where it shines, I don't know of any in particular. I remember when taking my Declarative Programming course in uni…
>I can't find any details on this experiment though...
Probably this one: http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr1049.pdf
But take it with some sacks of salt -- it's a single research paper. It should be replicated, peer reviewed, etc to have any merit. It's methodology could be totally crap for example...
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#47Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
Production use cases pushed me towards Haskell. What elegance there is serves towards reasoning about the correctness of complex code, however the tradeoff is difficulty in reasoning about performance. You can still get great performance! And I use it for prototyping in the Type-Driven Development style. Strongly disagree with "if it compiles it is correct" but we have great tools like Doctest and QuickCheck for that. I usually write types with DocTest examples first, then implement. undefined with lazy evaluation is really cool for figuring out function signatures first.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#48Question to the Haskell experts here. Is Haskell more academic in nature or used heavily in Production environments? Is there an application sweet spot/domain (say Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, etc) where it shines over using other languages (I am not talking about software/language architectural issues like type systems or such)? I have no experience with Haskell but do use functional languages such as E…
We use Haskell in production at lumi.com for our backend/API. We've found it very productive and easy to maintain.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#49If anyone's curious to try out functional programming, I would highly recommend Elm. I haven't been so excited about a language since I went from C to Ruby ten years ago, and Pragmatic Studios has a great course on it (I have no affiliation): https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/elm
Elixir is mentioned on the page too. Does it complement Elm?
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#50> 1. There is a learning curve. Time and experience can cover up anything. So this does not say much about Haskell other than it is all negative without time and experience. > 2. Haskell has some very nice libraries So does NodeJS and (on an abstract level) Microsoft Word. Libraries are infrastructures and investments that (like time and experience) can cover up any shortcomings. > 3. Haskell libraries are sometimes…
> The line that if it compiles, it’s probably correct is often true.
That is the meat of why Haskell is so great. I've never so reckless refactored code as much as I do in Haskell, I just wait for the compiler to tell me what I missed and go back and fix it up. I'd never do that in C, C++, Java, etc; it'd be suicide.
And while that's still not a great fleshed out explanation, it's a great oversimplification of the symptoms of a programming language with a great type system. And that type system is more or less the only reason to use Haskell.
As other people in this thread have commented, Haskell has fantastic abstract libraries, which let you do abstract things, the most useful of which that I'm aware of/understand is parsing. Parser combinators are a very natural fit for Haskell, and making DSLs with them becomes practically trivial to do.
Edit: I think the author takes for granted the general praise that Haskell gets, and was attempting to temper it with his practical experiences using the language.