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Why Not Haskell?

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Re: Why Not Haskell?

#51

Post by mechanical_fish »

jberryman wrote: post #35
j_baker wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is like claiming that Latin is a more useful language than English because almost all of the Latin you see is excellent writing by amazingly talented authors, whereas in English you have all these badly spelled text messages from your friends and Tweets from famous people and love notes from your sweetheart and baby babbles and second-grader scrawls and five-paragraph essays by high-school sophomores and job offers and breaking news and Reddit jokes and HN rants and Wikipedia articles and text-adventure games and comic-book speech balloons and bestselling dime novels to wade through in order to get to the well-written stuff.

And, of course, you rarely hear Latin mispronounced. In fact, the only thing rarer than hearing Classical Latin being mispronounced is hearing it being pronounced correctly. E.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar

In Greek, during Caesar's time, his family name was written Καίσαρ, reflecting its contemporary pronunciation. Thus, his name is pronounced in a similar way to the pronunciation of the German Kaiser.

On the bright side, Latin does embody a vast array of fascinating tidbits like that one. Plus you can read two-thousand-year-old poetry and cast spells like Harry Potter.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#52

Post by nightski »

radarsat1 wrote: post #25

I've been doing a whole lot of scientific Python lately, and every time I let my program run for like an hour only to crash on an array of the wrong dimensions, or pass in a scalar where an array is expected or vice versa, I swear and wish I was using a strongly typed language like Haskell. If only it had the same tools as SciPy I'd be all over doing my scientific work in Haskell. (Not to mention it would have faster…

I agree, and this is something I am investigating also. Data Parallel Haskell is an awesome base for something like this, but it is hard to tell if anyone is actually still working on it - and even harder to tell how one would contribute. Especially since there are so many spin off projects like Repa which have some of the functionality but just don't quite make the cut (lack primitives, hard to implement new parallel operations, etc...).

The potential is there, it just needs to be exploited.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#53

Post by CoffeeDregs »

I wrote a post that was picked up by HN a while ago about why I left Haskell, so I won't rehash my arguments, but ...

On reflection, I love(d) Haskell, but the tradeoff that created the IO monad was too much for me. After 5 years using Haskell and a couple of years away from it, I've become convinced that the way Haskell isolates IO and state is not the correct solution. I'm not smart enough to know the correct solution, but creating monads, monad transformers and arrows and then providing sugar to get everything to look imperative again feels wrong. Uniqueness Types feel a bit healthier.

Now that I've said that, let me say that I'm most certainly impressed with the work around IO and state in Haskell because it was an amazing bit of intellectual horsepower and is an incredible step. But it doesn't feel like the final step/answer. Unfortunately, I had to get work done for clients and had to step away from Haskell, but I'm excited to see what the community brings forth. It's the most beautiful language on earth.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#54

Post by gtani »

teaspoon wrote: post #40
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

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Keywords

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#55

Post by jlarocco »

I've been using Haskell on and off for a few years and have written a few (small) projects in it. Every time I end up turned off of it, though.

First, I don't like how it makes side effects such a PITA. Fact of the matter is, computing is only useful for the side effects. A computation is useless if the result isn't printed to the screen, saved to a file, sent over the network, or used in some other way. So why make side effects so difficult?

Second, the community, or at least a vocal minority, come off as very condescending. If I have to ask a question on IRC I probably already feel dumb, I don't need somebody treating me like a child because I don't understand something.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

michaelochurch wrote: post #37
waqf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#57

Post by Agathos »

m0th87 wrote: post #18
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…

Haskell has some notoriety in the financial industry. Obviously the language isn't used as extensively as, say C++ in commercial applications, but to go to such extremes as saying "nobody" uses it is plain wrong.

A couple of years ago, the only ads I would ever see on gmail in my haskell-cafe folder were for Jane Street Capital.

But they don't use Haskell. The ad basically asked if they could talk me down to OCaml. It came up for discussion on the list, and as I recall they preferred OCaml so they could write speedy code without getting hung up on lazy evaluation and its sometimes-difficult-to-predict execution time.

I still haven't looked at OCaml, although I had some exposure to SML in college. I'm looking at Scala these days (The type inference isn't even Hindley-Milner! Scandal!).

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#58

Post by joevandyk »

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…

I've had very similar experiences -- especially with the operators.

I'm also nervous about the "DLL Hell" the article mentioned. I want to be able to build my programs for the next 10 years without having to worry about dependencies going away.

I believe this is because cabal doesn't generate a manifest of the exact versions your library/application depends on (unlike Ruby's bundler's Gemfile.lock file).

Hopefully this gets resolved soon.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#59

Post by joevandyk »

PPGualtieri wrote: post #50

Once you manged to grok the basic stuff about Typeclasses, Functors, Applicative, Monads, Monad Transformers, different notions of recursion, a minimal understanding of how lazyness can be quite tricky, the multitude of different ways of how errors and exceptions are handled in various libraries, and perhaps basic STM, Haskell has a tendency to become even more complex. If you want to do efficient IO and prevent spac…

Are most of those names for simple concepts / design patterns / types?

I'm finding more and more that the hardest part of haskell is understanding the syntax and the terminology.

Re: Why Not Haskell?

#60

Post by bonch »

melling wrote: post #21

In the end the author seems to be using Go for a lot more development. Are people here finding it to be a good solution? It seems like it might be the language that could bridge the iOS and Android systems for app development.

The author is using Go because they work at Google.
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