> Performance is hard to figure out
1000x changes in performance is not a problem if:
1. Performance of one module is not overly dependent on the code that uses it.
2. Performance never degrades order of magnitude with new compilers.
I tried Haskell for 5 years
71–80 of 273 posts
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#72Question 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've been playing with it for about 5 years, started the local Haskell meetup, etc. I used it on a side project that reached beta in 2015, and on a startup at the beginning of 2016. Starting at the end of 2016 I started using it on a big contract. I had to convince the client it was a good idea, but they've been convinced by my team's productivity. All of the above were back end web services. The current project is a…
I'm VERY curious about this! Backend web services not being the sexiest / most theory-requiring subject.
How did you convince the client, and why did you choose Haskell for this over, say, .NET, which throws a web service up quicker than it took me to type this? What sort of productivity are you achieving?
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#73Question 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…
> Is there an application sweet spot/domain State of the Haskell ecosystem: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md The topics are roughly sorted from greatest strengths to greatest weaknesses. Each programming area will also be summarized by a single rating of either: Best in class: the best experience in any language Mature: suitable for most programmers Immature: only acceptable for early-adopte…
Thanks for the link. Great reference. This could keep me occupied for a while.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#74We have a code base of roughly 200,000 lines of Haskell code, dealing with high performance SQL query parsing, compilation and optimizations.
I only remember one situation over the past 5 years that we had a performance issue with Haskell, that was solved by using the profiling capabilities of GHC.
I disagree that performance is hard to figure out. It could be better, yes - but it's not that different than what you'd get with other programming languages.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#75Wow, really good writeup. And on point regarding '5 days' vs '5 years' approach.
And it really confirms my biases against the language.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#76The thing with enlightenment level ideas isn't that they aren't enlightening but that they attract hype. Individuals pretending to be enlightened if you will.
A scientific mindset as well as liberalism are also ideas where new proponents often want to draw a line in the sand to stratify people into superior and inferior. The original proponents were chasing a higher level of quality for all, but the need for social stratification weaponizes and gates ideas.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#77> 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…
> (#1) Time and experience can cover up anything.
This is simply not true. Time and experience can never cover up for lack of expressiveness, and expressiveness is one of the biggest selling points of Haskell.
In fact, experience can only cover for complexity, and lack of discoverability or intuitiveness. Haskell has all those three flaws, so you see, experience is really needed.
> (#2) So does NodeJS and (on an abstract level) Microsoft Word.
No, they don't. Javascript and macro Basic do not even have enough expressiveness for supporting the kind of library you'll find in Haskell.
> (#3) That is simply negative, right?
That's the inevitable downside of #2.
> (#6) That is a general description of specialty -- unless he means all hard are easy.
Well, not all obviously. You still can't declare "f = solution to SAT in polynomial time" and be done with that. But the sheer amount of hard stuff that becomes easy is unsettling.
About #8, I'll let it open. Experience and investment can certainly not overcome anything as you claim, but I'm still not decided wether to classify Haskell as "the best available for nearly anything (maybe except if you have a killing library in another language)" or "hell, why can't somebody just come and rewrite it as something _simple_", or both.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#78> 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…
> ... I am a bit lost
Google "cognitive dissonance" and the "sunk cost fallacy."
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#79Question 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…
"academic/hobbyist" probably doesn't give justice to the benefit those works provide for languages that implement experiments pioneered in i.e. haskell. I say "probably" because I can't give any exact examples.
Re: I tried Haskell for 5 years
#80Question 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've been writing Haskell for nearly 10 years and am coming up on 4 years writing it full time. (You could say I know the language pretty well...)
I think it's just a pretty good general purpose language, for the most part? I know that's not very exciting of an answer, but I do consulting for people and I've seen Haskell for everything our clients do, from web development (a lot of web development), compiler development, distributed OLAP style analytic processing on large data volumes, custom languages/DSLs, machine learning, hardware/FPGA design work, desktop software (flight tracking/schedule software, used by on-ground airport personnel, with some incredibly beautiful code), cryptocurrency and cryptography etc etc. There are the occasional research-y things, and we've also just done things like that for random institutions or companies (e.g. prototyping RINA-style non-TCP network designs.)
I wouldn't say any of these were a particular "sweet spot". Though some things like compiler development or web development are pretty pleasurable. The language and libraries make those pretty good. Web development is one of the more popular things now especially. Everyone has to have their thing in a browser now, and there's a fair amount of library code for this stuff now. Definitely one of the stronger things.
You do get the occasional problem that just has this perfectly elegant solution at the core and that's always an awesome bonus. One of my favorites was the aforementioned flight software. It had this very strict set of bureaucratic guidelines but all the core logic ended up having a very nice, pure formulation that ended up being about 8 functions used in a single function-composition pipeline. (We use this sometimes as an example in our training of real solutions for real problems.) A lot of software is much more boring and traditional.
Mostly, it works well and stays out of my way, and lets me solve problems for good. And I really like the language in general compared to most other languages; it hits a very unique sweet spot that most others don't try to touch.
I do admit the sort of high level, abstract shenanigans are fun and interesting too, but I think of it more as a fun side thing. Just this week I literally wrote the documentation for a data type, describing it as an "Arbitrary-rank Hypercuboid, parameterized over its dimension." Luckily I do not think you will ever have to use that code in reality, so you can breath easy. :)
---
EDIT: and to be fair, there are definitely some problems. Vis-a-vis my joke, we could all collectively use better "soft" documentation. I think some problems like "operator overload extravaganza" are overblown due to unfamiliarity. Most real codebases aren't operator soup; but bigger problems are things like "When to use the right abstraction" are real problems we have hard times explaining.
I don't think performance is much harder than most other languages, but we definitely don't have tools that are as nice in some ways, nor tools that are as diverse. The compiler is also slow compared to e.g. OCaml. Some parts of the ecosystem are a lot worse than others; e.g. easy-to-use native GUI bindings are still a bit open. Windows is a bit less nice to use than Unixen.
There's a big gap between training in-person vs online/self taught content too, IME.