61–70 of 85 posts
Wonder if Haskell is still around at Meta these days, does anybody know?
Yes, (and so is OCaml) but less than in the past, mostly for specialized and older projets. Most engineers at Meta will not encounter these languages. It's costly to integrate them with the internal tools and arguably not worth the effort. On the other hand, Rust is increasingly popular and well-supported and approved by the company.
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Every time I try to work on someone's Haskell code, I'm confronted with a slew of custom infix operators, and I find my previous experience is completely irrelevant as I learn the new DSL the authors chose to write (which more often than not also involves flexing their brain as hard as they can).
But that's like half of computing.. every new tool the world inflicts on you, configured in Jojo's Awesome Configuration Language, with some arbitrary made up grammar punctuated by Tourette outbursts of special character line-noise. That, or YAML, then a tool to template and generate the YAML, and then a stack of tools wrapped around that, ad infinitum. A little learning is the cost of not having to write the thing y…
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What do you mean by "long time"? Why wouldn't it apply just the same to some Python file that defines a Maybe with a bit of unwrap and bind and orElse or whatever? Instead of things going boom and spewing a stack sometimes they just go Nothing instead, you don't need much more understanding than that. There is a lot of syntax in Haskell that is somewhat hard to understand at first but you don't actually need it to wr…
Long time, I mean possibly several weeks of full-time studying for an intermediate Python or C++ programmer. I'm not saying you need any CS theory to write Haskell or that it's super hard. But I think the learning curve is pretty steep, and it's hard to write code without a good understanding of the concepts. Just tweaking until it type checks isn't going to cut it. Consider this code. Generated from ChatGPT. This is…
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I've encountered many otherwise solid engineers who are intimidated and/or put off by Nix (the language).
I count myself among them. And I wouldn't say I am "otherwise solid". I am solid. Nix is just a weird custom footgun-laden language in a place where I don't want to have to learn a weird custom footgun-laden language. It has other serious issues too, like the fact that it is declarative makes discoverability extreeemely difficult. What does setting `foo: true` do? You can't go-to-definition on it. You can only hope i…
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What do you mean by "long time"? Why wouldn't it apply just the same to some Python file that defines a Maybe with a bit of unwrap and bind and orElse or whatever? Instead of things going boom and spewing a stack sometimes they just go Nothing instead, you don't need much more understanding than that. There is a lot of syntax in Haskell that is somewhat hard to understand at first but you don't actually need it to wr…
Long time, I mean possibly several weeks of full-time studying for an intermediate Python or C++ programmer. I'm not saying you need any CS theory to write Haskell or that it's super hard. But I think the learning curve is pretty steep, and it's hard to write code without a good understanding of the concepts. Just tweaking until it type checks isn't going to cut it. Consider this code. Generated from ChatGPT. This is…
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I'm not fully convinced. FP is such a different paradigm than the leading imperative/OO design that most are comfortable with. Other languages that are too different like lisp, forth, Apl, Haskell, and Prolog are just too different for the average person IMO. I've given Haskell/OCaml/F# a go a few times and enjoy learning new paradigms and it certainly didn't click for me. I have a feeling it'll be even harder with m…
> FP is such a different paradigm than the leading imperative/OO design that most are comfortable with. I don't think most of FP is at all hard for most programmers to understand. Hell I interviewed plenty of Javascript devs that couldn't solve a simple fizzbuzz level question because they didn't know how to do for loops - they only knew how to use `.forEach()`! The hard bits in Haskell are: 1. Purity. I get it, but…
Haskell doesn't have operators, it's based on expressions consisting of function compositions, some of which can be infix and look like operators.
> This is just a collection of words. No clue of what is a function call, what is a variable name, etc.
That's by design, because all of them are expressions that can either reduce immediately or require runtime data to reduce fully.
> How about you pick between 8 alternatives...
How about you pick either of those and start using for real, and then come to the point it either works well or you find inefficiencies to look specific alternatives for? It doesn't take much.
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I've encountered many otherwise solid engineers who are intimidated and/or put off by Nix (the language).
I count myself among them. And I wouldn't say I am "otherwise solid". I am solid. Nix is just a weird custom footgun-laden language in a place where I don't want to have to learn a weird custom footgun-laden language. It has other serious issues too, like the fact that it is declarative makes discoverability extreeemely difficult. What does setting `foo: true` do? You can't go-to-definition on it. You can only hope i…
For starters, you compared Nix the ecosystem to Starlark, perhaps the smallest aspect of Bazel. But Bazel (the ecosystem) has a horrendous documentation problem as well.
I grant that "Nix" is a very overloaded term, but it seems like you don't know which part of Nix you are even referring to. "Somewhere... in all of Nix" is not something that makes any sense.
I fully admit that Nix has a steep learning curve. Very steep. But I don't think you know enough to give a thoughtful critique.
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I count myself among them. And I wouldn't say I am "otherwise solid". I am solid. Nix is just a weird custom footgun-laden language in a place where I don't want to have to learn a weird custom footgun-laden language. It has other serious issues too, like the fact that it is declarative makes discoverability extreeemely difficult. What does setting `foo: true` do? You can't go-to-definition on it. You can only hope i…
This shallow dismissal pretty much proves OPs point. For starters, you compared Nix the ecosystem to Starlark, perhaps the smallest aspect of Bazel. But Bazel (the ecosystem) has a horrendous documentation problem as well. I grant that "Nix" is a very overloaded term, but it seems like you don't know which part of Nix you are even referring to. "Somewhere... in all of Nix" is not something that makes any sense. I ful…
No I compared the Nix language to Starlark.
> but it seems like you don't know which part of Nix you are even referring to.
Incorrect. I was referring to the Nix language, as was hamandcheese. He literally said it explicitly. I don't know how you could miss that.
> I fully admit that Nix has a steep learning curve. Very steep. But I don't think you know enough to give a thoughtful critique.
You're proving my point here. The very steep learning curve and "you need to be an expert before you can use it" aspects of Nix (both the language and the package manager) are exactly the problem.
Let me put it another way. Imagine I gave you a vacuum cleaner, and you tried to turn it on but it had a very complicated startup sequence so you needed to read the manual... but the manual was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. You take it back to the shop and they say "nah this is a perfectly good vacuum cleaner. Sure it has a steep learning curve but you just need to spend some time learning it before you can criticise it".
That's obviously stupid right? For most people package management is like vacuum cleaning. It's a necessary task they want to think about as little as possible.
Nix is written by a vacuum cleaner collection & restoration club, who assume that everyone in the world is as obsessively into vacuum cleaners as them.
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I count myself among them. And I wouldn't say I am "otherwise solid". I am solid. Nix is just a weird custom footgun-laden language in a place where I don't want to have to learn a weird custom footgun-laden language. It has other serious issues too, like the fact that it is declarative makes discoverability extreeemely difficult. What does setting `foo: true` do? You can't go-to-definition on it. You can only hope i…
you're not solid, by what you've just written here and in above threads.
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This shallow dismissal pretty much proves OPs point. For starters, you compared Nix the ecosystem to Starlark, perhaps the smallest aspect of Bazel. But Bazel (the ecosystem) has a horrendous documentation problem as well. I grant that "Nix" is a very overloaded term, but it seems like you don't know which part of Nix you are even referring to. "Somewhere... in all of Nix" is not something that makes any sense. I ful…
> For starters, you compared Nix the ecosystem to Starlark No I compared the Nix language to Starlark. > but it seems like you don't know which part of Nix you are even referring to. Incorrect. I was referring to the Nix language, as was hamandcheese. He literally said it explicitly. I don't know how you could miss that. > I fully admit that Nix has a steep learning curve. Very steep. But I don't think you know enoug…
I am hamandcheese. I replied to your comment. You didn't describe a single aspect of Nix-the-language. You wrote this:
> What does setting `foo: true` do? You can't go-to-definition on it. You can only hope it is well documented (it isn't) or try to find the place that reads that key ... somewhere... in all of Nix... Good luck.
It's appears (despite the wrong syntax, another clue that you are not particularly well informed) that you are referring to a NixOS module option. Or maybe a Home Manager module option. Either way, not a language feature.